This year has proven two things to us. First, people still really like going to the movies. The box office is up year-over-year, assisted by strong “original” features (scare quotes because a few of them are adaptations), and those hits have been massive compared to what we’ve seen from tentpoles. Second, it seems the long-awaited preference cascade has come for Disney — their non-Pixar established properties just aren’t doing that hot. A movie like Thomas Kail’s Moana should do gangbusters, and this isn’t a Snow White situation. On paper, all the ideas are pretty solid: It’s not a dramatic reimagining of the 2016 animated film, which was a proven hit; it is well-cast, and, hell, if people went to see a Lion King prequel even with that god-awful tech they used for the ’19 one, surely they’d eat up this, the safest of safe plays. Yet it’s been greeted with a shrug, its opening-weekend tracking falling well short of what the Mouse hoped for, and perhaps it’s because they’ve run out of runway.
Seriously, what genius had the idea to make a live-action Moana remake? Here’s a theorem that I think will hold up well (with the possible exception of the inevitable Frozen remake), at least until Gen Alpha has children of their own: any live-action Disney reboot will fail — critically and financially — if it isn’t old enough to have been released on VHS. The audience for these movies is as much the parents as the children, and the first thought a parent has when seeing The Rock looking like he’d taken a deal to become the next face of Head and Shoulders isn’t “Aw, we better call the sitter,” it’s “wait, that was ten years ago? I thought we just watched that yesterday!” Say what you will about the earlier remakes, but they had a revival feel to them, striking the right nostalgic notes to get the crowd to Amen along with the choir. Folks got excited and sang along in the theater, parents hoped to share the experience they had as children with their own kids, and so on. If anything, it’ll just make parents sad — their sweet little kid that they took to see this when they were six is now sixteen. Good luck getting them into the theater for this one.
You’ll notice I haven’t spent much time talking about the movie itself, and that’s because there’s little to say about it. It’s Moana, just with more realistic character animations and a little less style. It’s not really worth synopsizing, honestly — it’s the same story, retold nearly line-by-line, about a headstrong not-princess (Catherine Laga’aia), a demigod (The Rock), and a screaming chicken heading out to return the “heart” of a god and save her people from ecological disaster. Theoretically, if a family were to see this and liked the first Moana, they’ll probably like this one, since it builds on a sturdy structure. Moana was one of the strongest non-Pixar Disney features in the last quarter-century, and it makes sense the Mouse would go through the motions in a remake — if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. It’s safe, which is what the Mouse and the Rock want — the former because of the Snow White disaster last year, the latter because of his “fall from grace” or whatever.
Goofy costuming aside, I don’t think Rock is bad in this, mainly because he can better express himself physically than vocally, and his charisma adds a little bit of flair to an already well-written part. He and Laga’aia have strong chemistry, and, to be fair, if there were a real justification for this to exist, it would be that it serves as her debut to a mainstream audience. She may be the best live-action take on a Disney princess since Amy Adams in Enchanted in that she’s a compelling lead, which is something most of these features have lacked. Kail, who’s done a ton of notable work as a stage director, manages the performances well enough, and everything goes down easily. The effects work is Disney-standard (bad and rushed), with a few exceptions, such as when the band of Coconut pirates attacks our intrepid heroes, but even then it’s pretty much the same as the original, just reskinned. The songs are the same, and they’re still pretty catchy, with one new track, co-written by Lin-Manuel Miranda, serving as exit music. Yes, what should be a major feature is regarded as an afterthought. It’s par for this course.
In all honesty, I’m sure Disney thought this was what people wanted. They’ve spent a decade tinkering with their catalog — IP preservation first and foremost, with an additional interest in modernizing the titles for the sake of easy PR wins — and it’s bizarre how little fruit it’s borne, especially when one considers how it started. I know there’ll be quibbles with this, but I consider Jon Favreau’s The Jungle Book to be the real start of this era (despite Tim Burton’s Alice serving as its traditional marker and the project that convinced Disney these films were a better investment than, say, Mars Needs Moms) and that was a shockingly good feature. The rockiness of how it shifted from modern adventure filmmaking to often-swell renditions of the original’s songbook proved an asset, making it feel old yet surprisingly new, as shaggy as it was. It had Christopher Walken doing “I Wanna Be Like You.” You can’t beat that.
Every film since then has struggled to follow this blueprint — even Favreau couldn’t recapture the magic when he inflicted The Lion King on us — with the musicals having a significantly lower batting average than the others (at least Cruella and Pete’s Dragon had style). But remaking a movie that’s less than ten years old has a certain amount of audience-spiting cynicism that is much harder to ignore than any of the previous films. It’s a wonder that, out of all the movies to be precious about, it’d be this one, not the ones with nostalgic attachment so strong that a joke about a fast-food tie-in in a wholly unrelated program could lead to nerds throwing temper tantrums at their local McDonald’s.
Moana is, ultimately, Disney reaping what they’ve sown, pursuing a blighted strategy until dust clouds are blowing off the drought-ridden soil. Things can only get worse from here: Their bench is almost empty, with several potentially successful features consigned to streaming in an ill-advised attempt to sell Disney+ to fence-sitters with theatrical-quality titles.* Perhaps it’s time to, I don’t know, make real movies again? It’s a scary thought — they could always remake The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes instead and keep the flops coming — but hey, it might pay off. Then they can make a live-action remake in twenty years! Everybody profits! Well, except for the audience.
* These are the geniuses who debuted a Hocus Pocus sequel on streaming, after all.