Moana's Live-Action Opening Is Now a Genuine Box Office Question Mark

Disney's live-action Moana was supposed to be one of the safer bets of the summer. Instead, with the film opening July 10, tracking has turned into one of the more closely watched box office stories of the season — and the numbers depend heavily on who you ask.

Deadline's latest weekend preview still has the film pointed toward a $75 million domestic opening and a $130 million-plus global start, with overseas expected to add another $70 million to $75 million. But that same report flags a warning sign sitting right underneath those numbers: advance ticket sales are running around just $4 million, a soft figure that Deadline itself notes points more realistically toward a $60 million-plus domestic weekend rather than the higher end of tracking.

Why are other trackers so much more pessimistic?

Not everyone is reading the tea leaves the same way. Independent tracking firm Box Office Theory has cut its projection dramatically over the past few weeks — from an $75 million to $96 million range in mid-June down to $57 million to $72 million by early July, with a pinpoint estimate around $62 million. A separate round of updated tracking that circulated a few days later pushed the pinpoint figure even lower, into the $45 million to $60 million range, prompting several outlets to frame the film as a potential Disney misfire in the making.

That's a wide gap between the trade-backed forecast and the independent one, and it says something about how genuinely uncertain this opening has become. Whichever number ends up closer to reality, both point in the same direction: this is tracking well below where Disney would want a Moana-branded release to land.

What's working against it?

Timing looks like a real factor. Moana opens directly into a crowded family-film corridor, sharing the multiplex with Toy Story 5 (projected north of $140 million in its own weekend) and Illumination's Minions & Monsters, both of which are eating into the exact family audience this remake needs. There's also a more structural question hanging over the project: unlike most Disney live-action remakes, which tend to revisit films from a decade or two earlier, the original Moana is only ten years old, and Moana 2 — an animated sequel — was still playing in theaters as recently as 19 months ago. That's a lot of Moana in a short window, and it may be blunting the nostalgia factor that usually drives these remakes.

Budget context makes the stakes clearer, too. Disney hasn't officially confirmed a production budget, but comparable CGI-heavy remakes like Beauty and the Beast and The Jungle Book, adjusted for inflation, suggest a cost somewhere in the $200 million to $230 million range before marketing. A $45 million to $75 million domestic opening would put the film well behind Disney's biggest remake successes — Beauty and the Beast opened to $174.7 million domestically, and The Lion King to $191.7 million — and even below 2023's The Little Mermaid, a film widely viewed as an underperformer for the studio.

None of this appears to be shaking Disney's long-term plans for the franchise, at least publicly. Dwayne Johnson, who returns as Maui, recently confirmed to reporters that a live-action Moana 3 is already being discussed, regardless of how this weekend plays out. Whether that confidence is warranted should become clear fast — industry watchers will have final numbers within days of the film's release.