Moana
Directed by Thomas Kail · Catherine Laga'aia, Dwayne Johnson, Rena Owen
Musical Adventure · 2026-07-10
“The trailer got a seventy four percent dislike ratio, Disney publicly refused to change anything, and then lost somewhere north of a hundred million dollars finding out the internet was right.”
In March the trailer landed and collected one hundred and forty nine thousand dislikes against fifty three thousand likes, roughly a seventy four percent dislike ratio, with the complaints centring on Dwayne Johnson wearing a curly wig and VFX that looked washed out and synthetic. Disney looked at that data, declined to make creative changes, and released the film exactly as planned. It opened to forty three million dollars domestically against the studio's own projection of sixty to sixty five, on a two hundred and fifty million dollar budget plus roughly a hundred and twenty million in marketing. Deadline projects a loss of a hundred to a hundred and twenty five million dollars. The audience told you in March. You had four months.
Thirty one percent on Rotten Tomatoes across a hundred and eighty three reviews makes this the lowest-rated of all the Disney live-action remakes, which is a competitive field. Alissa Wilkinson in the New York Times asked simply why, and what the point was, and concluded it might be the worst of them. The Guardian gave it two stars and called it a superfluous piece of monetisable content. The A.V. Club said soulless and CG-by-numbers. Rolling Stone said one step away from AI slop. The Telegraph said it could have been made by a ChatGPT prompt. When six outlets independently reach for the word artificial, that is not a hot take, that is a diagnosis.
The Dwayne Johnson problem deserves its own paragraph because it is so strange. Deadline described his Maui as oddly catatonic, as if he had left his usual considerable charm behind in the voice booth. The Guardian said he was on autopilot, like a piece of software. This is a man whose entire career is built on being the most present human being in any room, playing a character he already played, and somehow generating less energy in a body than he did with only his voice. The wig is the joke, but the performance is the actual failure.
- 01
Catherine Laga'aia is genuinely excellent and is praised in almost every review, including the hostile ones. Deadline called her the film's sole source of actual life.
- 02
The songs survive. They were unimprovable going in and the film has the sense not to try.
- 03
Rena Owen as Gramma Tala brings real weight and is repeatedly singled out as a highlight.
- 04
Audiences liked it far more than critics: an A minus CinemaScore and an 89 percent Rotten Tomatoes audience score, so families walking out were not miserable.
- 01
The VFX look synthetic and washed out, exactly as the trailer reaction predicted, and the ocean has less personality than it did in animation.
- 02
Dwayne Johnson gives a strangely flat, low-energy Maui, described by two separate outlets as catatonic and on autopilot.
- 03
It has no reason to exist. Multiple critics use the word pointless, and the film never answers what a live-action version adds.
- 04
Metacritic sits at 42 with a user score of 3.1, which sharply contradicts the 89 percent Rotten Tomatoes audience figure and suggests the goodwill is thinner than the opening weekend implied.
Families with young children who want the songs on a big screen and will not be auditing the render quality, and anyone who wants to watch Catherine Laga'aia announce herself as a genuine star.
Anyone who loved the 2016 film, anyone allergic to remakes that exist for the ledger rather than the story, and anyone who was already annoyed by the trailer, because the finished film will not change your mind.
This is the rarest thing in modern marketing: a campaign that accurately predicted its own reviews and was ignored. The trailer was mauled in March with a seventy four percent dislike ratio, the specific complaints were the wig and the artificial-looking VFX, and both complaints appear almost verbatim in the professional reviews four months later. Disney declined to make creative changes and Thomas Kail has since been left responding to questions about Maui's missing design features after the fact. You had the focus group of the century, for free, in public, and you filed it under haters. A hundred million dollar loss is an expensive way to prove that the comments section was doing your job better than you were.
Your website, CV, or whatever you made. I'll roast that too.
A full teardown from €2,99. No mercy.