On a cinema wall in Newtown, in Sydney’s inner west, two film posters hang side by side. One shows 19-year-old Catherine Lagaʻaia as the Polynesian wayfinder Moana, the other 26-year-old Milly Alcock as the DC superhero Supergirl. Both women are former students of the same local state school, Newtown High School of Performing Arts, and for a brief moment this July, audiences could watch them on the big screen on the same day. The coincidence is a point of quiet pride in a suburb more accustomed to producing musicians and artists than global blockbuster leads.

Daniel Kavanagh, the school’s head drama teacher, remembers auditioning an 11-year-old Lagaʻaia. “The ability to listen and collaborate and use creativity in a lot of the activities that we were doing … It wasn’t so much the acting skills,” he told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. He described her as bright, positive, and fiercely committed. When the Moana role arrived, it fell in the middle of her final school year. Lagaʻaia flew to the United States to film, emailing assessment tasks back and forth, and eventually sat her Higher School Certificate exams through a special arrangement with the New South Wales education authority. “She was really committed to making sure that she did that,” Kavanagh said. “Some students might have just gone, ‘You know what, it’s just too hard.’” Alcock, a decade earlier, had faced a similar crossroads when the television series Upright interrupted her own final exams; she was unable to complete them.

The live-action Moana, which opened this weekend, is a $250 million production shot partly on location on the Hawaiian island of O‘ahu. The film re-teams Dwayne Johnson, who voices the demigod Maui, with a newcomer in the title role. Johnson, who is of Polynesian heritage, has spoken of the character being inspired by his grandfather and of the importance of showing “real people” from the Pacific islands. Yet the critical reception has been harsh. British reviewers were particularly scathing: The Guardian called it a “competent but pointless and unexciting back-to-basics live-action remake”, while The Independent’s one-star notice described it as “a waste of everyone’s time and talent”. The Telegraph suggested it “could have been made by a ChatGPT prompt”. In the United States, Variety’s critic was more generous, writing that the film “escapes the remake blues – in fact it soars above them”, but the dominant note was one of fatigue with Disney’s recycling of its animated catalogue.

North American box-office projections tell a sobering story. Pre-release forecasts had pointed to a $60–65 million domestic opening, but by Friday afternoon trade publications were projecting just $40–45 million. By comparison, the animated Moana 2 opened to $139.7 million in 2024. The original 2016 film earned $684 million worldwide against a $150 million budget. The new version, with its larger budget, will need to perform strongly overseas to avoid the fate of last year’s Snow White, which lost $170 million. Analysts in Los Angeles note that the film is playing in 3,875 North American venues, and that the studio can take some comfort from the continuing success of Toy Story 5, which is expected to cross $400 million domestically this weekend.

Away from the numbers, the production itself is a study in the tension between the real and the fabricated. The ocean was, at times, a giant studio pool; the animal sidekicks Heihei and Pua were entirely computer-generated, requiring actors to mime their interactions. Even Johnson, a former professional wrestler, had to wear a prosthetic muscle suit to achieve Maui’s physique. Lagaʻaia, meanwhile, navigated the surreal experience of global promotion while still a teenager, determined, as her teacher put it, to remain “normal and being a student and part of the culture at school”. On the cinema wall in Newtown, the poster of Moana gazes out with a determined expression, a reminder that behind the corporate arithmetic and the critical broadsides, a young woman from Sydney’s inner west has just stepped onto the world stage.