Make way, make way, for we have a new leader in the streaming race. Disney has spent much of the last decade turning its animated classics into live-action blockbusters, with mixed results. Some of them have been billion dollar sensations, while others have been spectacularly expensive disappointments. This looked like it was going to be a guaranteed hit but, perhaps, Disney were hit with the law of diminishing returns.
Disney’s live-action Moana has officially climbed to No. 1 on the Disney+ movie chart in the United States, according to streaming tracker FlixPatrol. It officially reached the top spot on October 23, and it has kept the top spot, which is particularly impressive because it managed to beat seasonal favorites including The Nightmare Before Christmas and Hocus Pocus. The film made its Disney+ debut on October 21, so it didn’t take long for it to pop, but to be fair, this should not be a surprise: Disney+ has regularly seen the original, animated Moana in its top 10 ever since the streaming platform launched.
Directed by Thomas Kail (Hamilton), the film is a beat-for-beat remake in live-action (although, with the amount of green screen involved, that’s pushing it quite a bit), that follows the young Polynesian wayfinder, Moana, who makes the bold choice to travel beyond her island’s reef in order to stop a darkness from spreading and ruining their way of life. The cast includes Catherine Lagaʻaia (The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart) as Moana, Dwayne Johnson (Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle) as Maui, John Tui (The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies) as Chief Tui, Frankie Adams (The Expanse) as Sina, Rena Owen (Once Were Warriors) as Gramma Tala, and Jemaine Clement (What We Do in the Shadows) as Tamatoa.
Four love stories, four completely different ideas of what it means to
be somebody’s person. This is the one that matches how you actually fall, and what it would ask of
you.
You do not fall for strangers. You fall for the person you have
already been talking to for years, which is the slowest and by some distance the most
durable way anybody has found to do this.
- When Harry Met Sally made the case that the best romance is an argument you enjoy,
conducted over a decade, by two people refusing to admit what is happening. - You want to be known rather than swept away. Somebody who remembers your worst story is
doing better work than anybody arriving with flowers. - The film is unusually honest about timing. These two are wrong for each other repeatedly
until suddenly they are not, and neither of them engineered it. - You would still be talking about everything at eighty. That is the entire promise.
You want a partner, not an audience. Somebody who wants their own
life as badly as you want yours, and who would never ask you to be smaller to make the
relationship easier.
- This is the rare romance where both people have a real career and the film takes both of
them equally seriously. - You would rather be pushed than protected. The right person for you is also a bit of a
rival, and that never entirely goes away. - It understands the actual problem in ambitious relationships. Not whether you love each
other, but whose turn it is this year. - You would still be competing at forty. That is how you would know it was working.
The intensity was never the problem. The secrecy is. You are
drawn to a love that lives entirely in private, and to the particular ache of wanting
somebody you are not supposed to want.
- Heated Rivalry runs on the oldest engine in romance: two people on opposite sides,
meeting in secret, getting far more attached than either of them planned. - You keep your private life genuinely private, and something in you finds hidden things
more real than public ones. - The tension is not only between the two of them. It is between what they have and what
it would cost either one to say it out loud. - Years of this, and the whole story is really about whether either of them will finally
stop hiding.
You do not do this cautiously. When it happens for you it is
immediate and total and it rearranges everything, and you would not accept a smaller version
of it.
- Titanic gave us the biggest romance in film history and then made it last about five
days, which is precisely the point of it. - You measure love by intensity rather than duration. A few days of the real thing beats
decades of something merely comfortable. - The film is not only about the romance. It is about a woman who went on to live an
enormous life afterwards because of it. - You would still be telling this story at a hundred years old, and telling it exactly the
same way.
How Badly Did ‘Moana’ Perform at the Box Office?
Released on July 10, 2026, the remake opened to approximately $43.1 million domestically, eventually earning $126.2 million in North America and $323.9 million worldwide. Those numbers would be impressive for a smaller family movie, but Disney reportedly spent approximately $250 million on production alone.
Critics weren’t particularly impressed either. The movie currently holds a 33% Rotten Tomatoes critics’ score, compared with a considerably stronger 87% verified audience score. The movie’s position atop Disney+’s American movie rankings suggests that audiences remain interested in the characters, even if they weren’t willing to turn out in comparable numbers for another theatrical adventure.
The original animated film and its sequel are also available on Disney+, alongside the 2026 live-action remake.
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Catherine Laga'aia
Moana
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Maui
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John Tui
Chief Tui
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Frankie Adams
Sina
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