The first trailer for the live-action version of Moana went live yesterday, which is almost a 1:1 shot-for-shot remake of the original movie, leading to a common question: Why?
Why take an extremely good animated movie like Moana and slap a live-action cast over it in the exact same scenes and sequences? What’s the point of this? The answer, of course, is money. Not just money, but money money. Easy money, in this case for Disney, where it now seems almost mandatory to do these live-action remakes every year. We are talking serious cash here. Take a look:
- The Lion King – $1.6 billion
- Beauty and the Beast – $1.2 billion
- Aladdin – $1.05 billion
- Lilo and Stitch – $1.03 billion
- Alice in Wonderland – $1.02 billion
- The Jungle Book – $967 million
- Maleficent – $759 million
- Mufasa: The Lion King – $722 million
- The Little Mermaid – $569 million
- Cinderella – $542 million
Given the popularity of the original Moana, I don’t think there’s any way that we see less than a billion-dollar gross for the live-action movie. It’s a “free” billion, at that. No, obviously the cost of the movie itself will be high, but it’s just…look at the original movie, recreate all the shots and dialogue, and you’re good to go. That hasn’t been true of all of these, but that appears to be the case with Moana here. Even if not, there is no amount of work that goes into a movie like this that will not justify an inevitable billion dollars at the box office. God help us when the live-action Frozen movie comes out.
The misses here are incredibly rare. This year’s Snow White was an unequivocal bomb with a $205 million opening, criticism on the left pointed at Gal Gadot, criticism on the right pointed at Rachel Zegler, but mostly it was an average-at-best of a property that’s close to 100 years old at this point. You can’t win them all, but you are going to win with Moana, that much is clear.
Is this creatively bankrupt? You could certainly make that argument. But Disney would not be doing this if it wasn’t bringing audiences out in droves. Granted, they are going to run out of their big features at some point here, as we are getting closer to present day with these very modern movies like Moana. And I mean, you’re not exactly going to make a live-action Toy Story or Finding Nemo or Inside Out, are you? Well, honestly, I’m not going to rule anything out.
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