•Disney’s live-action Moana will arrive on streaming service Disney+ on Oct. 21, more than three months after the film debuted in theaters to a disappointing box office performance.
The movie opened with $43 million at the domestic box office on its opening weekend—a significant miss given its reported $250 million budget. It eventually grossed around $323.6 million worldwide, but films typically need to earn double or 2.5 times their budget for a studio to break even, marking what appears to be an underperformance for Disney.
Critics criticized the film for failing to establish its own identity compared to the 2016 animated original, and audiences appeared similarly unenthusiastic about a live-action remake of a movie released just a decade earlier. In most cases of Disney’s other live-action retellings, the animated films being revisited were often decades old.
The original animated Moana and its 2024 sequel are musicals centered on Polynesian culture that both proved popular with audiences. The first film holds a 96% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and earned $687.2 million against a budget of $150-175 million. Its 2024 follow-up, Moana 2, was more divisive among critics yet became an even larger box office success, grossing over $1 billion on a $150 million budget.
Despite several box office disappointments in recent years, including this film and The Mandalorian and Grogu, Disney remains one of only two studios to surpass $4 billion at the worldwide box office in 2026. The company’s biggest earner this year is Toy Story 5, which grossed more than $1 billion globally, while The Devil Wears Prada 2 also performed well with $692 million.
Toy Story 5’s strong performance did not prevent Disney from laying off employees at Pixar earlier this year. The studio has additional films coming, including what could be its biggest hit of 2026, Avengers: Doomsday.
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