Disney's $1.7 Billion Fantasy Franchise Officially Comes Back In 1 Week

Published Jul 1, 2026, 5:28 PM EDT

However, even though 2017’s Beauty and the Beast was a big box office success, the cracks in the company’s formula were already starting to show after only a few years. While 2019’s The Lion King was a financial success, its reception among fans was more mixed, while the same year’s Dumbo remake was an outright critical failure. 2022’s Pinocchio and 2025’s Snow White only made matters worse, proving that Disney’s live-action remakes were far from guaranteed to succeed.

In an interesting change from the studio’s usual approach to live-action remakes, 2016’s Moana is set to receive a live-action remake of the same name in July 2026, marking the return of one of Disney’s biggest franchises to the small screen. Originally planned as a spinoff show, 2024’s sequel Moana 2 was turned into a theatrical movie when the 2016 original became the most-streamed title in Disney+ history and broke a whole host of other viewing records for the company.

Moana’s Live-Action Remake Can Make The Disney Franchise Even Bigger

As a result of Moana’s unexpected Disney+ success, the studio fast-tracked both its animated sequel and its live-action remake in a move that broke with the company’s usual approach. Until now, most of Disney’s live-action remakes were based on movies that were originally released at least two decades before their re-imaginings. In contrast, Moana was originally released in 2016, only ten years before the arrival of its remake.

Before Moana’s announcement, the shortest gap between a Disney animated movie and its live-action remake came in the form of 2020’s Mulan, which was released 22 years after the animated 1998 original. 2020’s live-action Mulan remake was largely viewed as a failure, but this had little to do with the comparatively brief break between the original movie’s release and its remake’s arrival. However, the longer the breaks between the animated movies and their remakes, the more room there is for directors to reinterpret their stories in radically different ways.

2026’s Moana Signals A Change in Disney’s Approach To Live-Action Remakes

For example, while 1996’s 101 Dalmations changed a lot of specific plot details from 1961’s animated original, 2021’s Cruella was a completely original, almost unrelated movie. Similarly, Maleficent completely rewrote Sleeping Beauty’s entire story, and this was facilitated in part by the 55-year gap between the release of the original animated movie and its remake. That said, it should hardly come as a surprise that Disney was in a hurry to release Moana’s live-action remake considering the original movie’s unprecedented Disney+ success.

If anything, the studio showed restraint, as the release date of Moana’s live-action remake was originally set for June 2025, a mere nine years after Moana 2's cinematic release. Since this would have put the remake in theaters less than a year after the release of its sequel, cooler heads prevailed, and Disney postponed the remake’s release by a year.

While Moana earned $687 million at the box office, 2024’s Moana 2 vastly outdid its predecessor with a massive $1.059 billion gross. Thus, Moana’s live-action remake comes burdened with big expectations, especially after the underperformance of 2025’s Snow White, and its impact could end up deciding how long the company waits between original releases and live-action remakes in the future.