What went wrong with the live-action Moana

The latest of Disney's live-action remakes, of its beloved 2006 animation, opens this week – and could be a surprising flop. From the moment it was announced, it has been ill-fated.

When a trailer for the new live-action remake of Disney's Moana went online in March, one of the main talking points was the sight of Dwayne Johnson's long, curly and weirdly unconvincing wig. The Rock's locks prompted countless unkind comments, but the most damning insult came from the accordion-playing, pop-parodying Weird Al Yankovic, who posted a photo of the bewigged Johnson on Instagram, alongside the caption: "We've told all the casting agents that the Weird Al biopic sequel is currently on hold, but they just keep sending in headshots."

Ouch. Yankovic's assertion that he and Johnson were lookalikes may have been a jovial wisecrack, but it was part of a mocking trend. Moana just wasn't getting the reverence that Disney might have hoped for. Well before its release, the new version of the Polynesian princess's ocean-going adventures was hit by wave after wave of criticisms.

Now various cinema tracking specialists have predicted that Moana will earn between $50m and $85m (£37m and £64m) in its opening weekend in the US: that's less than half of what another Disney remake, Lilo & Stitch, earned in the same period a year ago – and a long way from what the studio might have expected from one of its most popular pieces of IP. As it turns out, the quality of the film itself could be the problem.

The live-action Moana is uncannily similar to the cartoon – but at no point does it ever match it. While the cartoon's animation was dazzlingly bright and rich, with joyous character design and luminescent views of turquoise waves and verdant island scenery, the live-action rehash has lots of relatively ordinary-looking actors standing around in blurry CGI settings.

How the bad buzz started

Even before the new film was screened to critics, though, there was a sense that Moana was running low on Disney's signature magic. The first grumblings were heard as soon as the project was officially unveiled by Johnson in April 2023. Tim Robey, film critic for The Telegraph and author of Box Office Poison: Hollywood's History in a Century of Flops, notes that some of the hostility directed at it has included a bigoted element.  "The live-action Disney remakes focused on female, non-white main characters – look at The Little Mermaid – have a habit of doing particularly badly, and being bullied online more than the ones with boy heroes," he says. But there have been plenty of other non-political reasons for all the Moana moaning too.

For one thing, the cartoon came out just a decade ago in 2016, so it's not as if anyone was crying out for the new film. One selling point of Disney's remakes is nostalgia. But there simply hasn't been enough time for anyone to feel nostalgic about Moana.

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