Disney’s new chief executive officer, Josh D’Amaro, who took over the top job from Bob Iger in March, admitted what most of Hollywood already knew: THE MANDALORIAN AND GROGU and the live-action MOANA both missed their box office targets.
“Even when our franchise films don’t meet our box office expectations, as with ‘The Mandalorian and Grogu’ and the live-action ‘Moana,’ our investments in these core properties fuel other parts of our company,” D’Amaro said during Disney’s Q3 fiscal 2026 earnings call on Aug. 5. He wasn’t apologizing so much as reframing the math.
THE MANDALORIAN AND GROGU opened to $81 million domestically back in the spring and has since climbed to a $345 million worldwide total, respectable but short of the four-quadrant blockbuster Lucasfilm hoped for on a reported $165 million budget. Live-action MOANA fared worse, settling around $262 million worldwide against a production budget near $250 million, a gap analysts estimate could cost Disney roughly $100 million once marketing is factored in.
D’Amaro argued the shortfalls come with fine print.
“THE MANDALORIAN AND GROGU drove healthy growth in retail sales for the STAR WARS franchise and drew guests to the updated Millennium Falcon attraction at Disneyland and Walt Disney World and led to significant engagement in gaming as well,” he said. Grogu plush toys and a refreshed Disneyland attraction, in other words, are doing quiet work the box office ledger doesn’t show.
He struck a similar note on MOANA, betting on Disney+ to finish what theaters didn’t.
Related: STAR WARS: THE MANDALORIAN AND GROGU
“The live-action MOANA is expected to be a strong title on Disney+, building on the success of the original film, which is one of the most-streamed movies of all time,” D’Amaro said.
Disney’s chief financial officer, Hugh Johnston, backed him up on the call, framing theatrical grosses as one chapter in a much longer book.
“The theatrical window in a lot of ways is just one data point, and the real value of that IP is the cumulative benefit of decades-long storytelling,” Johnston said.
Movieguide® was tracking both movies well before the spin got applied to their ledgers. Families genuinely showed up for THE MANDALORIAN AND GROGU: Movieguide® reported that nearly a quarter of opening-weekend audiences were under 18, drawn by a father-son story that leaned into the warmer side of the Star Wars galaxy, backed by an 89% Rotten Tomatoes audience score, the best of any live-action Star Wars movie yet. That’s a movie earning its box office the honest way, through story and character rather than spectacle alone.
MOANA is a tougher case, and Movieguide® said so at the time. The outlet’s own analysis pointed to the movie’s “mixed, very pagan worldview,” with its parade of island gods and goddesses, as a real deterrent for families hunting for something cleaner than the animated original. Timing didn’t help either. The 2016 movie was still fresh in family memory, and audiences weren’t exactly clamoring for a swift remake.
None of this means Hollywood’s math is broken. It just means the math Disney’s shareholders care about and the math families care about aren’t the same equation.
A movie can underperform by Wall Street’s standards and still be exactly the kind of story worth a family movie night, or it can hit every marketing beat and still leave discerning parents cold. D’Amaro’s job is spinning the first kind of story. Movieguide®’s job, as always, is helping families sort out the second.
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