Dwayne Johnson responds to negative reviews of Disney's live-action Moana
The Rock told People the first two reviews for Disney’s live-action Moana were great and then everything turned, and the film now sits at 31% on Rotten Tomatoes with $262.7 million worldwide against a reported $250 million production budget.
Dwayne Johnson is taking the reception to Disney’s live-action Moana about as well as anyone could.
Speaking to People, the actor said the first two reviews came in and they were terrific, and then things went another way, as he put it, the way things sometimes do.
“That’s just the way it goes because we’re in this business,“ he said.
What Dwayne Johnson said about Moana’s reviews
Johnson reprised Maui in the remake, the role he originated in the 2016 animated film and played again in Moana 2.
He told the magazine he and his wife, songwriter Lauren Hashian, worked through it at home, at the kitchen island, late at night once their kids were asleep. The thing he kept coming back to was whether anyone would remember the opening weekend a year from now.
His position on the movie itself hasn’t moved. If you loved it, great. If you didn’t, he says that’s fine too.
What he says actually mattered was the film’s Polynesian-inspired cultural material getting onto a big screen, and his own children being able to see it there. That was the reason it got made, in his telling.
Moana’s Rotten Tomatoes score versus its audience score
The critical number is rough. Disney’s live-action Moana holds 31% on Rotten Tomatoes and 42 on Metacritic.
Audiences went the other direction, with reported audience scores in the high eighties, which is a spread of roughly fifty points between the people paid to watch it and the people who bought a ticket.
For context, the 2016 animated Moana sits at 96% and made $643.5 million worldwide. Moana 2 came in at 61%.
The remake, ten years later and at higher ticket prices, has made about 41 cents for every dollar the original made.
Much of the criticism landed on the same spot: the original was already computer-animated, the remake leans heavily on CGI to get its magic and its demigod onto the screen, and the visual gap between the two turned out to be narrower than the price of a second ticket.
What Disney said about Moana on its earnings call
Disney addressed the film itself two days ago, in the fiscal third-quarter results.
CEO Josh D’Amaro grouped it with Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu, which finished around $345 million worldwide, and said that even when the company’s franchise films miss their box office expectations, the investment in those properties feeds other parts of the business.
For The Mandalorian and Grogu he named the receipts: Star Wars retail sales growth, guests drawn to the updated Millennium Falcon attraction at Disneyland and Walt Disney World, gaming engagement.
For Moana, the pitch was different. D’Amaro said it’s expected to perform strongly on Disney+, building on the original, which is one of the most-streamed films ever.
That’s the whole answer, and it’s not nothing. Variety has reported the remake standing to lose Disney around $100 million theatrically, and a strong streaming tail genuinely offsets some of that.
It’s also the first time in a while that a Disney live-action remake’s business case has been made in the past tense about the original and the future tense about streaming, with the theater left out of the sentence.
Moana is still in theaters. Johnson, for what it’s worth, seems less bothered by any of this than the people writing about it.
Article compiled with the help of the Pirates & Princesses newsroom.
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Hat Tips:
The Walt Disney Company newsroom commentary from CEO Josh D’Amaro (August 5, 2026), the franchise-films remarks and the Disney+ expectation for Moana
People (August 2026), Johnson’s original interview and quotes, via Variety and TheWrap
Variety (August 5 and 6, 2026), Johnson’s comments, the Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic scores, and the reported theatrical loss
TheWrap (August 6, 2026), additional detail from the Johnson interview and the box office running total
ScreenRant (August 6, 2026), the audience score and the comparison against the 2016 original and Moana 2