🍿 'Moana' Remake Suffers Disastrous Box Office Debut

For a project carrying a net production budget of $250 million—excluding marketing costs—such a debut guarantees substantial losses.

When a Remake Arrives Too Soon

The failure caught the studio completely off guard. Heading into the weekend, Disney had projected an international debut of around $75 million and a global opening in the $130–140 million range. Instead, reality forced a severe downward revision of expectations. Key overseas markets brought in mere crumbs: Australia yielded $5.3 million, France generated $5.2 million, and South Korea managed $3.8 million. The biggest disappointment, however, was China, where Moana effectively collapsed at launch, scraping together a symbolic $1.2 million.

This performance places Moana alongside some of Disney’s worst live-action adaptation openings. Box office analysts are drawing direct parallels to last year’s flop, Snow White, which debuted to $87 million worldwide. Yet, while experts blamed Snow White’s failure on the excessive age of the 1937 original material—which had lost its cultural equity among Gen Z and Generation Alpha—the exact opposite factor was at play for Moana: timing.

The original animated film was released relatively recently, in 2016, and its billion-dollar sequel, Moana 2, stormed theaters less than two years ago, in late 2024. Industry history clearly demonstrates that the engine driving Disney’s live-action remakes is pure millennial nostalgia. Projects anchored in the animated classics of the 90s and early 2000s—such as The Lion King, Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast, or the recent Lilo & Stitch (2025)—easily crossed the billion-dollar threshold. For Moana, audiences simply haven’t had enough time to grow nostalgic.

The situation was further aggravated by brutal competition in the family segment. Thomas Kail’s film ran headfirst into the box office juggernaut Toy Story 5 (which amassed a phenomenal $879.1 million by its fourth weekend) and the spin-off Minions & Monsters ($280 million globally against a modest $85 million budget).

Despite being panned by professional critics, general audiences received the film, starring Catherine Laga’aia and Dwayne Johnson, much more warmly. Strong word-of-mouth may steady its legs and soften the box office drops in the coming weeks, but it will not be enough to rescue the economics of a $250 million blockbuster. Nevertheless, Disney has no intention of stopping its remake assembly line: a live-action version of Rapunzel (Tangled) is already in active development for 2028.

Other Weekend Highlights

In stark contrast to the billion-dollar ambitions of major studios, mid-budget genre franchises are demonstrating a completely different economic model. The new horror release Evil Dead Burn opened internationally to a sluggish $13.3 million, bringing its cumulative global total to $27 million. While this performance is significantly below that of its 2023 predecessor (Evil Dead Rise), the film cost Sony and Warner Bros. just $20 million to produce. The horror title will require very little effort to turn a profit, and the studios have already announced a seventh installment in the franchise, Evil Dead Wrath, for 2028.

The definitive champion of the week, however, was the Michael Jackson biopic, Michael. The film officially crossed the historic $1 billion benchmark at the global box office, becoming the second billion-dollar release of 2026 after the animated hit The Super Mario Galaxy Movie (both titles are distributed internationally by Universal).

This marks the first time in cinematic history that a biographical drama has achieved the coveted $1 billion milestone.