Disney's live-action Moana is tracking for an $85 million opening, low for a remake of this size

The projections for Disney's live-action Moana came in this week, and they are fine. Fine is the story.

Trackers have the remake opening around $85 million domestic over the July 10 to 12 weekend, with some reads sliding into the mid-$60s. For most movies that is a summer number people would kill for. For a Disney live-action remake of a top-shelf title, it is the softest headline the studio has posted in a while.

Here is the company it keeps. The live-action How to Train Your Dragon opened to $84.6 million last summer, and that was a DreamWorks property Universal was happy to have. Disney's own recent remakes have opened bigger, in some cases much bigger: Lilo & Stitch did $146 million in 2025, The Lion King did $191 million in 2019, and Beauty and the Beast did $174 million back in 2017. Moana is tracking closer to the floor of that group than the ceiling.

What makes the number a little strange is the timing. The brand is not cold. Moana 2 grossed a hair over $1 billion worldwide in 2024, with $460 million of that domestic. The 2016 original did about $643 million worldwide and has spent years as one of the most-replayed things on Disney+. If you were picking a Disney character with a live-action remake in the chamber, Moana would look like the safe bet. The tracking says the audience does not see it that way, at least not yet.

Part of that is the reception risk hanging over the movie. The trailers have landed unevenly, and the early betting on the film's Rotten Tomatoes score has drifted toward the 60 percent range, low for a Disney tentpole and a sign that the people watching the marketing are not fully sold. None of that is a verdict. Reviews start after the advance screenings on July 9, and trailer reactions have been wrong before. But studios read the same tea leaves audiences do, and a soft tracking number next to a shaky score prediction is not the combination Disney wanted going into the second weekend of July.

The calendar is not doing the movie any favors either. Toy Story 5 is still sitting near the top of the chart with close to $585 million banked worldwide, and it plays to a lot of the same families. Minions & Monsters is already in theaters working the animation crowd. Moana is walking into a room that is already full of the exact audience it needs.

The movie itself has real muscle behind it. Thomas Kail, who directed Hamilton on stage and on screen, is calling the shots. Catherine Laga'aia makes her film debut as Moana, Dwayne Johnson is back as Maui, and Jemaine Clement returns as the treasure-hoarding crab Tamatoa. The songs come from Lin-Manuel Miranda, Opetaia Foa'i, and Mark Mancina, so the parts of the animated film people actually hum are intact.

So the question for July 10 is not whether Moana wins the weekend. It probably does. The question is whether it opens like a Disney remake or like a movie the studio spends the rest of the summer explaining. Eighty-five million is the line. We find out Friday whether it clears that comfortably or just barely.