It’s time to scrap the live-action ‘Moana’ remake
It’s unprecedented — and ridiculous — for Disney to have an animated and live-action version of a franchise at the same time. PLUS: The final trailer for ‘The Wild Robot,’ and the ‘Shang-Chi’ director swings over to Spider-Man.
There’s a ton to talk about in this Friday edition of Popculturology. But before we get to a The Wild Robot trailer, a new Spider-Man director and The Hunt for Gollum, we need to address Disney’s convoluted plan for a beloved franchise ...
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Disney needs to move on from its Moana remake
If you’ve been reading Popculturology long enough, you know that I’ve been against Disney’s live-action Moana remake since it was announced.
I can give you countless reasons: The live-action movies are blatant cash grabs. The remake puts Dwayne Johnson at the centerpiece of the project. It hasn’t even been a decade since Moana was released.
And now that there’s a real, legit, fully animated Moana sequel heading to theaters in just a few months, it’s time to officially scrap the live-action Moana remake.
It just doesn’t make sense to have both.
In Disney’s defense, their current Moana situation was never the plan. The original animated Moana was supposed to be relegated to a Disney+ series while Johnson would lead the live-action remake into theaters.
The story of how Moana the Disney+ series transformed into Moana 2 was told both in an Associated Press piece and an Entertainment Weekly cover story over the past week.
“We developed the world, we developed the over-arching story that we’re still telling,” Moana 2 co-director David Derrick Jr. told The AP. “We would screen it in our big theater the way we watch all of us our projects here. There was a groundswelling, unanimous concert of everyone saying this needs to be on the big screen.”
“We constantly screen [our projects], even in drawing [phase] with sketches,” Walt Disney Animation chief creative officer Jennifer Lee told EW. “It was getting bigger and bigger and more epic, and we really wanted to see it on the big screen. It creatively evolved, and it felt like an organic thing.”
I’m thrilled that Disney realized what they had with the story that was going to be the Moana animated series. I love Moana. The next part of this story should be told in theaters with all the advantages that come with being a feature film.
But now Disney boss Bob Iger finds himself in the unprecedented place of having two simultaneous versions of a franchise potentially in existence. The studio knows this is a problem too, already pushing the remake back to July 2026. It’s not enough, though.
