The live-action MOANA is sinking at the box office, and Movieguide® isn’t surprised.
According to Variety, the remake of the 2016 animated Disney movie only pulled $43 million from 3,827 North American theaters over its opening weekend. The movie came with a massive production price tag of $250 million, plus even more for marketing.
In the movie, “Moana (Catherine Lagaʻaia) answers the Ocean’s call and, for the first time, voyages beyond the reef of her island of Motunui with the infamous demigod Maui (Dwayne Johnson) on an unforgettable journey to restore prosperity to her people,” Disney’s official synopsis reads.
But nostalgia, a musical adventure and Johnson’s star power aren’t enough to overcome the movie’s troubling worldview issues.
While Movieguide® praised its “moral, pro-family and redemptive values,” MOANA earned a -2 content score for “serious problems areas.”
“MOANA has a mixed, very pagan worldview. The moral, redemptive content mentioned above is diminished by the movie’s polytheistic ideas. There are multiple references to gods, including a lava monster god and a goddess of nature, and the hero is called a demigod,” the review said. “Because of that, Movieguide® advises strong or extreme caution.”
MOANA’S box office disappointment set a new low for Disney.
Related: Is MOANA 3 Already in the Works?
“Disney invented this live-action phenomenon based on their animated films, and they’ve had remarkable success with them,” said David A. Gross, publisher of the box office newsletter FranchiseRe. “But this opening isn’t close to Disney’s past remakes.”
“The last MOANA was a smash 20 months ago, but that makes this a very brief return for a remake,” he added. “This story wasn’t ready to come back, and audiences are not rushing to see it.”
Gross and Variety suggested that timing is the live-action version’s main problem, which certainly factored into limited interest. But like other summer 2026 flops, the worldview issues are likely turning off potential viewers, too.
SUPERGIRL, which debuted June 21, struggled to soar as expected due, in part, to a “negative Romantic, pagan, selfish” worldview, per Movieguide®. It’s made just $115,401,114 worldwide, landing it in the No. 20 spot of the year so far.
MINIONS & MONSTERS, the latest installment in the ever-popular MINIONS franchise, debuted to a franchise low of $36.4 million over its holiday opening weekend, and results haven’t started to look up.
The problem? Occult themes in a children’s movie. Movieguide® cautioned that MINIONS & MONSTERS “has two light obscenities, strong cartoon violence and three occult scenes about using a book of magic to conjure a monster.”
Movieguide® isn’t surprised by these results. Year after year, we find that movies with uplifting themes, redemptive stories and moral worldviews succeed, while content with occult, pagan or secular worldviews struggle.
Hollywood would do well to take note of this summer’s flops and avoid themes like these in the future.
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