Moana Live-Action Eyes $130M Global Opening Weekend
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- Disney is projecting a $130M+ global opening for its live-action Moana, with domestic tracking pointing to $60M+ at 3,900 theaters — though earlier tracking had placed the North American start at $75M, with advance sales near $4M pulling the figure down.
- Dwayne Johnson reprises his demigod Maui alongside newcomer Catherine Laga'aia, who replaces Auli'i Carvalho as Moana; Thomas Kail — director of Disney+'s filmed Hamilton stage version — directs, marking his feature debut.
- The original Moana ranks among Disney+'s most-watched films since its November 2019 launch, with 1.5 billion hours streamed and annual top-10 placement, giving the live-action remake a built-in audience Disney hopes to convert to theaters.
- Moana 2 opened just 19 months ago over Thanksgiving to a then-record $225.4M 5-day domestic bow and over $1 billion worldwide — a sequel cadence that has trade press openly asking whether the studio is burning through the franchise.
- Overseas, Moana holds a 91% footprint excluding Japan (opening end of July) and Italy (end of August), with How to Train Your Dragon's $96M international debut and Disney's own The Little Mermaid ($61M international) cited as comparable live-action comps.
- The wider summer box office is running 12% ahead of 2025 at $2.3B through the July 5 frame, with the domestic market on the verge of passing $5B — a 13% year-over-year gain — and upcoming Universal's The Odyssey and Sony/Marvel's Spider-Man: Brand New Day positioned as future tentpoles.
- Counter-programming includes Warner Bros./New Line's Evil Dead Burn at 3,000 theaters (tracking in the teens after its predecessor netted $46M on a $15M budget), Sony Pictures Classics' Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass at 1,200 theaters (81% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes), and A24's The Invite expanding to 1,600 sites — all three expected to land under $5M.
Why it matters: Disney is asking families to pay twice within 19 months for entries in the same franchise — a sequencing problem that's already prompted trade-press hand-wringing — and the gap between tracking's $75M and advance sales' $60M+ suggests soft word-of-mouth or repeat-viewer cannibalization rather than enthusiasm, even as Moana's 1.5 billion Disney+ hours guarantee a floor the original animated film couldn't count on.
