Within hours of its release, grainy clips of the live-action Moana began circulating on social media. The familiar strains of ‘How Far I’ll Go’ played over handheld phone recordings from the cinema, but something was off: the turquoise seas looked flat, the characters’ expressions oddly fixed. These bootleg snippets, shared hundreds of thousands of times, crystallised a dissonance between the film’s sun-bleached nostalgia and its reception on the ground.

The film, directed by Thomas Kail and starring newcomer Catherine Laga‘aia opposite a returning Dwayne Johnson as the demigod Maui, was meant to be a sure bet for the Walt Disney Company. It cost a reported $250 million to produce, not including marketing, and arrived just nineteen months after the animated Moana 2 shattered Thanksgiving records with a $225 million five-day opening. Instead, the live-action version scraped together $43 million in North American ticket sales and $52 million overseas, for a global debut of $95 million—one of the poorest showings in the studio’s decade-long parade of remakes.

Disney’s strategy of turning animated classics into live-action spectacles has been both lucrative and polarising. Films like Lilo & Stitch and The Lion King sailed past the billion-dollar mark, but last year’s Snow White foundered. This Moana faced a unique paradox: its source material, released only in 2016, remains a streaming juggernaut and a beloved cultural touchstone, particularly for Pacific Islander communities. The production mounted an extensive authenticity campaign, building a physical village and hiring cultural consultants—a point emphasised by Italian commentators who noted Lin-Manuel Miranda’s insistence that the new orchestrations were ‘more full, more deep’. Yet critics from Indonesia to San Francisco found the result hollow, accusing the film of draining the original’s imaginative verve. Indonesian reviewers described it as ‘hambar’—bland—lacking the magic that made the animated voyage feel like myth.

Audiences, at least those who showed up, were kinder. The picture earned a 90% verified hot audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, an A- CinemaScore, and strong parent recommendations, with 78% saying they would tell other parents to go. But the turnout was anaemic. Hollywood trade analysts pointed to fierce competition from other PG-rated holdovers: Minions & Monsters took another $20.5 million, Toy Story 5 added $18.5 million. Families, it seemed, were choosing familiar favourites over a retread. In many international markets, the film was eclipsed by local-language releases; in India, the slapstick franchise Dhamaal 4 raced towards the ₹50-crore mark over the same weekend. Even a modestly budgeted horror entry, Evil Dead Burn, managed to earn nearly half of Moana’s domestic haul on a $20 million production cost, underscoring the remake’s disproportionate risk.

The film’s end credits roll against a backdrop of sparkling water and a horizon that promises further voyages. Disney has already announced a live-action Tangled, another test of whether audiences will pay to see a story they can stream in its original form. For now, the most enduring image of this Moana is not the heroine’s bold sail into the unknown, but the silent, half-empty theatres that greeted her departure—a voyage that, for all its technical prowess, struggled to find the wind.