Following the wildly successful Moana and its sequel Moana 2, comes the live action version of the groundbreaking film.

Disney’s penchant for remaking their popular animated movies as live action films has been a major profit center for them. The recently released Lilo & Stitch was a hit at the box office, making just over a billion dollars worldwide. There have been live-action versions of The Lion King, The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast and Cinderella.

Despite the creative compromises that have to be made when converting an animated film to live-action, they’ve done well. The typical response from the movie-goers is, “Gee, that was great! Not as good as the original, though…”

Going from the miracle of animation to a live-action recreation of the look and feel of classic scenes from the original is critically important, and we see some of that in this teaser. It’s a creative trap, though. The audience is expecting mostly the same story they saw in the animated film, with their favorite scenes recreated in loving detail, but they’re also expecting to see something new that makes the new iteration worth seeing. The gamble is, will it be better than the original? So far, none of the efforts from Disney have accomplished this.

There’s another pitfall as well. A fully animated feature film typically takes between three and four years to go from script to release. A live-action film, however, even with lots of visual effects, takes about half that. See the problem? As the snake eats its own tail, eventually it catches up to its own head, and we’re approaching that problem already. The original Moana was released only ten years ago. They’re running out of material. The only option they have is to slow down and make some more animated classics to pad the back catalog for ten or fifteen years before they run out of material to clone.

Disney’s Moana (the live-action version) is still in production, stars newcomer Catherine Laga-aia as Moana and Dwayne Johnson as Maui, with Alan Tudyk as Hehe the Chicken, and is expected to release on July 10, 2026.