Disney’s live-action Moana opened wide today, and the number everyone’s staring at is 32%. That’s the Rotten Tomatoes critic score, and depending on the hour you check it, it’s ticked as low as 32% and as high as 37% as more reviews roll in — but the consensus hasn’t moved: critics don’t think this needed to exist.

The Numbers Don’t Lie

Critical reception has been largely negative, with Rotten Tomatoes currently showing a 32% “rotten” score from 50 reviews. Some counts have it slightly lower, with Moana sitting at a “Rotten” 33% on Rotten Tomatoes based on 49 reviews, and other tallies putting the aggregate as low as 37% once dozens more reviews landed — the worst in Disney live-action adaptation history, lower than at least 12 other movies, including the worst ones like Maleficent, Dumbo and Alice in Wonderland. However you slice it, this is Disney’s live-action remake floor.

The language critics are using isn’t subtle. David Fear of Rolling Stone called it “generic spectacle” and “peak Disney déjà vu,” while William Bibbiani noted it “only comes alive when it’s animated.” Over at the AP, Jake Coyle called it “as purposeless as big-screen summer spectaculars get, a would-be blockbuster driven purely by financial concerns.” The Telegraph went further, with Robbie Collin saying “Disney’s awful live-action Moana could have been made by a ChatGPT prompt.”

The Holdouts

Here’s the split: a real minority of critics are calling this one of the better entries in Disney’s remake machine. David Rooney’s Hollywood Reporter headline dubbed it “Captivating Newcomer Catherine Laga’aia and a Game Dwayne Johnson Invigorate One of Disney’s Better Live-Action Remakes.” Variety’s Owen Gleiberman went even further, writing that “‘Moana’ is a Disney live-action remake that escapes the Disney live-action remake blues — in fact, it soars above them. It’s the best of these movies I’ve seen.” He still concedes the whole exercise is beside the point, noting “On some level these movies will always be unnecessary. The remake of ‘Moana’ can’t, and shouldn’t, replace the original. But it earns a place alongside it.”

Even critics in the middle keep landing on the same word: redundant. Several reviews hail the movie as one of Disney’s “better live-action remakes,” and newcomer Catherine Laga’aia’s performance as the titular character is universally praised. But praise for the cast keeps getting undercut by the same complaint — that the film is, as one Austin Chronicle critic put it, so loyal to the original that “it proves its own redundancy. Everything good about it, from the jokes to the visual design, was already done, almost exactly the same, by animators a decade ago.”

What It Costs Disney

This isn’t a scrappy passion project bombing quietly. Moana is destined by some measures to be a smash despite these scores and a $250 million budget, but that’s become questionable — the most recent projections are that it may earn $60 to $65 million its opening weekend, or even as low as $40 million. For context, the Lilo and Stitch megahit opening weekend grossed $146 million, and this one arrives with a similar price tag to the disastrous “Snow White” live-action remake, which had a similar budget to this “Moana” and opened with $42M domestically.

Part of what’s fueling the backlash is timing. The original Moana was only released 10 years ago, and Moana 2 was just released in November 2024, not even two years ago — it seems ill-advised to reproduce these characters so quickly. Disney isn’t slowing down either — it’s already pressing forward with a live-action Tangled out in 2027, with Lilo and Stitch 2, Hercules, Maleficent 3, The Aristocats and Cruella 2 in the works.

So here’s the actual question this movie forces: if a nearly shot-for-shot remake of a decade-old film can pull a 33% and still be greenlit as a $250 million bet, does critical reception even factor into Disney’s math anymore — or is the whole remake pipeline now completely insulated from whether these movies are actually good?