🌊 Moana (2026) Review: What Critics Are Actually Saying

Moana topped the box office chart the weekend it opened, and it also landed one of the worst critic scores any Disney live-action remake has managed on the way there. Thirty-four percent on the Tomatometer. Ninety percent from the people who actually bought tickets. That 56-point gap is the widest one I've logged on this beat all year, and it isn't close.

The numbers, before the quotes

Here's what's on the record before a single critic gets to talk.

Divide the gross by the theater count ($43,142,824 ÷ 3,875) and you get an $11,134 per-screen average, enough to top this weekend's full box office chart even carrying reviews this bad. Nobody's calling this an underperformer. Nobody's calling it a triumph either. It's just a number that opened well and got savaged on the way to opening well, which is its own strange little category.

Is 34% actually rare, or just business as usual?

Not especially rare, it turns out. Line up Disney's live-action remakes by Tomatometer score and Moana lands second from the bottom.

Worth remembering what that percentage actually measures. Tomatometer counts the share of critics whose review reads as positive at all, not an average rating. A lukewarm, three-star pan doesn't get partial credit — it counts as Rotten, same as a total savaging. That's part of why the gap against the audience score, which behaves more like a genuine average of individual ratings, tends to look more dramatic on paper than it feels reading the actual reviews one at a time.

Three different directors, three different source films, one identical complaint from critics: nobody involved seems to have asked why the remake needed to exist beyond the obvious answer, which is money. Disney's live-action track record makes the pattern hard to miss. I don't think that's a coincidence, and I doubt the studio does either — the two worst scores on that list are four years apart and the underlying strategy hasn't moved an inch in between. So is Moana the least-loved Disney remake critics have sat through? No. That distinction still belongs to Pinocchio, by six points.

What critics can't get past

Not that it looks cheap. Not that the songs don't land. The complaint that repeats across review after review is simpler than that: nobody can find a reason for the remake to exist beyond the release calendar.

"Identical to Disney's 2016 feature in virtually every respect, it's an endeavor designed solely to motivate kids to bug their parents into ponying up for something they've already seen — only this time in a more plodding, perfunctory form." — Nick Schager, The Daily Beast

Harper Rochel Goldman at Moviejawn counted the ways the remake comes up short against its own source material, and did it in one sentence.

"Yes, it's duller, cheaper, and less funny, running through the plot in CliffsNotes fashion while somehow being longer than the original." — Harper Rochel Goldman, Moviejawn

John Nugent at Empire didn't need a full paragraph to land the harshest line of the batch.

"Few have felt so recent, or seemed so pointless, as Moana." — John Nugent, Empire

That's the whole review in eight words. I wish I could file that economically on deadline.

Not everyone's on board with the pile-on

A minority of critics gave this one Fresh ratings, and it's worth sitting with why, because it isn't nothing.

"It's the best of these movies I've seen." — Owen Gleiberman, Variety

"Easily one of Disney's best live-action remakes." — Tessa Smith, Mama's Geeky

Neither of those is a ringing endorsement of the movie in isolation. Both are ringing endorsements relative to the genre, which is precisely the point — grading a Disney remake against the field is a different exercise than grading it against its own animated original, and the critics who did the former landed a lot closer to where the paying audience did.

Is the 90% audience score even a fair fight?

Kind of, and also not really. Both things are true. "Verified Hot" isn't a vibes badge — it means the score cleared a minimum threshold of ticket-verified ratings before Rotten Tomatoes stamped it that way, so this isn't a coordinated pile-on in either direction, the kind that shows up around big divisive franchise sequels. But there's a selection effect baked into who's rating it at all. The people buying tickets to a movie built entirely on nine-year-old nostalgia are, by definition, the audience most inclined to enjoy exactly what Moana delivers. Critics don't get to self-select that way. They watch whatever's assigned that week, remake fatigue or not, and grade it against the category of "movies," not against a fond memory of 2016.

Why the split cuts so clean this time

Here's the mechanism, not just the verdict. Critics are grading Moana on whether it earns its own existence: an actual reason for the format change to happen at all, this particular week, in July 2026. Audiences bought tickets already knowing the songs. They wanted zero surprises, and they got exactly that. A movie can fail the first test and ace the second one in the same 100 minutes, which is close to the actual mechanics of why nostalgia plays flop or don't in the first place.

A note-perfect cover band can sell out an arena and still get panned by the two critics standing at the back with their arms crossed. The crowd isn't there for a daring new bridge on the chorus. They're there to scream the words they already know, on cue, together. Every time. That's Moana's whole critical split, condensed into one bar band playing the same set for the four hundredth night running.

You've seen this exact shape before if you were paying attention when Pinocchio dropped in 2022, or when Snow White did last year. Faithfulness reads as a feature to the people who grew up on the original and a bug to the people paid to evaluate craft for a living. Nobody's wrong. They're just not measuring the same thing.

What happens next

A 34% doesn't sink an opening weekend. This one topped the chart anyway. But it does shape the conversation for everything else that opens into a theater this summer. Legacy sequels and remakes with weak critic scores tend to front-load their gross and fade fast once the built-in audience has already shown up; the people who'd be persuaded by a bad review were never the ones buying the Friday-night ticket to begin with. Whether Moana holds like a title people recommend to friends, or drops like one nobody's defending past its first weekend, is the actual test, and it's a test next weekend's numbers will settle, not Rotten Tomatoes. Titles with this exact profile, savaged by critics and loved by the people who actually showed up, tend to hold better through their second and third weekends than their Tomatometer alone would predict. Word-of-mouth from ticket buyers who already liked it does more work on a Monday-through-Thursday than a critic consensus most of the opening-weekend crowd never read in the first place.

The mirror case worth reading is Toy Story 5, a different 2026 legacy title working through its own critics-versus-audience math (our full roundup is here). Disney has at least two more live-action remakes queued up after this one, a strategy that looks nothing like what Universal is doing with its animation slate instead. Judging by Pinocchio, Snow White, and now this, Disney has made peace with a Tomatometer floor in the high-20s to low-40s as the cost of doing business, and the audience-score cushion (90%, Verified Hot, the highest number in this entire piece) has held three times running. The real question is whether the crowd ever gets tired of paying full price to hear the cover band play the hits.

Methodology

Critic and audience scores reflect Rotten Tomatoes' published Tomatometer and audience score. Quotes are drawn directly from The Daily Beast (Nick Schager), Moviejawn (Harper Rochel Goldman), Empire (John Nugent), Variety (Owen Gleiberman) and Mama's Geeky (Tessa Smith), cross-referenced against Forbes, SlashFilm and Rotten Tomatoes' own editorial review roundup. Comparison scores for Pinocchio (2022) and Snow White (2025) were pulled directly from their current Rotten Tomatoes pages. We have not screened Moana ourselves — every opinion here belongs to the critic it's attributed to, not to us.