Disney's Live-Action Moana Remake Washes Up Critics Call It Neither Alive Nor Propulsive

Thomas Kail's 2026 retelling of the 2016 animated hit draws sharp notices for garish digital backdrops and a fundamental confusion about what live-action is even supposed to mean.

Disney's live-action Moana remake, directed by Thomas Kail, opened in 2026 to largely negative critical notices.
Reviewers at Deadline described the film as garish and visually incoherent, questioning whether it qualifies as live-action at all.
The remake follows a string of Disney live-action reboots — The Little Mermaid, The Lion King, Snow White — with mixed-to-poor critical track records.
The original 2016 Moana earned two Oscar nominations and grossed over $643 million worldwide.
No domestic box-office figures were available at the time of publication.

There was a moment, somewhere around the third act of Disney’s live-action Lion King remake in 2019, when audiences started asking an uncomfortable question: if the whole thing is rendered in photo-real CGI, is it actually live-action at all? Disney shelved the question and kept releasing remakes. The answer arrived again this summer, louder and less politely, with the studio’s 2026 retelling of Moana.

Directed by Thomas Kail — best known for his work on the original Hamilton stage production — the new Moana arrived in cinemas this summer carrying the full weight of franchise expectation and not quite enough of anything else. Deadline’s review, published in July 2026, called the film “neither alive nor propulsive,” and singled out its backdrops as garish, describing a production that cannot decide what register it is operating in.

The critique lands at a culturally awkward moment for Disney. The studio’s live-action pipeline has become one of the more reliable punching bags in mainstream film criticism — The Little Mermaid divided audiences in 2023, Snow White drew protests and poor reviews earlier in 2024, and the photo-real Lion King remains the go-to exhibit for the argument that fidelity to a source is not the same thing as filmmaking. Moana now joins that shortlist.

What makes the notices sting slightly more here is the standing of the original. The 2016 animated film earned two Academy Award nominations, including Best Original Song, and grossed north of $643 million globally. It introduced Aulii Cravalho and a soundtrack — largely the work of Lin-Manuel Miranda and Opetaia Foa’i — that still turns up on family-road-trip playlists a decade later. The baseline affection is real, which raises the stakes on any remake considerably.

Kail has not publicly responded to the reviews. Disney has not issued revised marketing positioning. The film’s domestic opening-weekend figures were not available at the time of publication.