🛶 Moana's Second Weekend: 56% Down, $250M Deep, and the Real Math on Breakeven

Nineteen million dollars. That's the weekend-two domestic gross, down 56% from a $43,142,824 opening, and the percentage isn't actually the interesting number. The interesting number is $250,000,000, the reported production budget sitting underneath it, with another $100M-plus in marketing on top. Domestic total through Sunday: $82,081,410. That's 33% of what the movie cost to make, before a single dollar of marketing gets counted, two weekends into its entire theatrical run.

Elliot's read: Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey didn't just beat Moana to the top spot this weekend, it exposed a gap in Moana's own math that no hold percentage was going to close (full breakdown of that fight is here). A 56% drop is, by the numbers below, one of the better holds a Disney remake has posted since 2019. It is also not remotely enough. Both things are true, and the rest of this page is the arithmetic that gets you from one to the other.

This weekend's top performers, July 17-19, 2026

Data as of the weekend of July 17-19, 2026. Theater counts and this-weekend grosses come from this site's own weekend chart. Minions & Monsters and Toy Story 5 hold percentages aren't recomputed here. This table exists to answer one question: who actually held up against Nolan. The answer is Moana held up better than most of the family lane while still losing more ground than it needed to. (The Odyssey's own second-weekend math, the one that decides whether it beats Nolan's Batman holds, gets tracked separately here rather than re-run in full below.)

Here's the column nobody else runs on this story. Moana's theater count went up between weekends: 3,875 for the opening (per our critics' roundup) to 4,200 for weekend two, a gain of 325 screens into a shrinking audience. Run the per-theater math and the real damage shows up: $11,134 per theater on opening weekend, $4,524 on weekend two. That's a 59% per-theater collapse, three points worse than the 56% headline drop, because Disney handed the same shrinking crowd more doors to walk through. More screens selling fewer tickets each is not a hold. It's a hold with an asterisk.

Last week's chart called Moana's slide at 45-50%. The actual number ran six points hotter. Close, not exact. The kind of miss where the direction was right and the size wasn't.

How 56% stacks up against every Disney remake's second weekend

Multiple trade outlets are running the framing that Moana just posted the smallest second-weekend drop for a direct Disney live-action remake since Aladdin in 2019. True, as far as it goes. What that framing skips: Aladdin's own second-weekend drop was tighter than Moana's, at roughly 51% against 56%. Moana out-held everything that came after Aladdin: Lion King, Snow White. It did not out-hold Aladdin itself. "Best since Aladdin" and "as good as Aladdin" are two different sentences, and only one of them is true here.

Where Moana actually sits: better than the disaster tier (Snow White's 66%, the widest drop on this list and the one that ended its run early), worse than the two remakes considered genuine holds (Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin). Call it the middle of the pack. Middle of the pack on a $250M movie is not where a studio wants to land.

The real math: can $250M plus marketing come back?

Budget plus marketing is the mortgage. Box office is the paycheck. Two weekends in, Moana's paycheck has covered the light bill, not the mortgage.

Run the numbers plainly. $250,000,000 production budget, confirmed across Variety, Deadline and The Numbers. Add an estimated $100M-$120M in prints and advertising, per trade reporting. Disney doesn't publish that figure, so treat it as a range, not a fact. Total money committed: roughly $350M-$370M.

Against that, worldwide gross through Tuesday, July 21: approximately $178M-$179M, per The Numbers' running tally. That's domestic's $82,081,410 plus an international haul that opened at $52M and posted $25M in its second frame, itself down 52% (per Variety's overseas coverage).

Trade estimates on the actual break-even line vary: one outlet puts it at $600M worldwide, another at $700M, two different guesses at how much of a ticket dollar a studio keeps once theaters take their cut. Split the difference and call it $650M. Moana has banked roughly 27% of that, two weekends into a run whose front-loaded stretch, the part that generates the biggest single chunks of gross a movie ever sees, is already behind it.

Is $250M recoverable from here? Only if the back half of this run behaves nothing like the front half did, and nothing in the numbers above suggests it will.

International was supposed to be the cushion. It wasn't.

Disney's own internal tracking had this film penciled in for something in the $130M-$140M global-opening range, with roughly $75M of that coming from overseas. It opened to $95.1M worldwide instead ($43.1M domestic, $52M international), already short before the second weekend even happened. Weekend two dropped the international number to $25M, a 52% slide that tracks close to the domestic side rather than cushioning it. When a movie's foreign and domestic drops move in the same direction at close to the same size, that's not a hedge. That's the same audience problem showing up twice.

Is there a soft landing, or is this the flop ledger?

The genuinely undersold part of this story: Moana's audience score sits at 90%, Verified Hot (the full critic-versus-audience gap is here), the highest number anywhere in this film's coverage. Titles that hold that kind of audience approval tend to out-legs their Tomatometer, and a 56% second-weekend drop against a 34% critic score is exactly that pattern showing up on schedule. That's the honest case for a soft landing: not a comeback, a landing.

It doesn't change the ledger math above. PVOD is expected in early September, roughly the standard 45-60 day window Disney runs on wide releases, with a Disney+ arrival trade estimates place somewhere between late September and November. Home-market revenue helps a studio's bottom line. It does not retroactively fill a $470M-plus gap between what's been grossed and what breakeven requires, and Disney doesn't report PVOD or streaming dollars against theatrical benchmarks the way it reports weekend grosses.

Next weekend's actual number decides more than this one did. If Moana's third-weekend drop lands back in the 45-55% band this site's chart already called for that frame, domestic clears somewhere near $90M-$95M and worldwide edges toward $220M-$230M, still nowhere close to $650M, with most of the theatrical calendar already spent. That's the number to watch Sunday, not the one that already printed.

Sources and methodology

Domestic weekend and theater-count figures for Moana and comparison titles are drawn from this site's own weekend chart (published July 20, 2026) and critic-consensus roundup (published July 19, 2026). Budget, marketing spend and break-even estimates are cross-referenced from Variety's box office coverage (July 2026), a Yahoo Entertainment box office report citing Exhibitor Relations analyst Jeff Bock and Comscore senior media analyst Paul Dergarabedian, and The Numbers' Moana (2026) financial page, pulled July 22, 2026. International weekend figures are per Variety's overseas box office coverage. Historical second-weekend comparisons for Beauty and the Beast (2017), Aladdin (2019), The Lion King (2019) and Snow White (2025) are drawn from contemporaneous trade reporting (Variety, Forbes, Fox News, Box Office Mojo weekend charts) at the time each film was in release. PVOD and streaming-window estimates are trade projections based on Disney's standard release-window pattern, not a confirmed studio date. Weekend figures are estimates until Monday actuals post; this page reflects the most recently completed weekend and updates when the picture changes.