Dwayne Johnson says he isn’t losing sleep over the tepid critical reception to Disney’s live-action “Moana,” even as the film struggles to find its footing at the box office. Johnson reprised his voice role as Maui for the remake and spoke to People about processing the response the film has drawn from critics. “Our first two reviews came out,” he said. “I’ll never forget it … They were amazing. I was like, ‘Wow.’ [Then] it went another way, as sometimes happens.”
He said mixed reviews come with the territory of the business and that he processed much of the criticism privately. “We had a lot of these conversations at home, at the kitchen island late at night when the babies are asleep,” he said, describing conversations with his wife, Lauren Hashian, about looking past the noise of opening weekend toward the film’s longer-term impact.
The film currently holds a 31% critic score on Rotten Tomatoes against an 88% audience score. Box office numbers have followed a similar pattern: the movie opened globally with just $95 million and had reached roughly $261 million by its fourth weekend in theaters, against a reported production budget of $250 million. Marketing costs added another $120 million on top of that, according to Variety.
Johnson said he holds no ill will toward anyone who didn’t connect with the film. “If you love it, great. If you don’t, no problem,” he said. For him, the larger victory was cultural rather than critical, pointing to the response from Polynesian audiences in particular. Johnson, whose mother is Samoan, said authentic representation sat at the center of the project from the start.
Thomas Kail, known for directing “Hamilton,” helmed the remake, which also stars Catherine Laga’aia, Rena Owen, John Tui, Frankie Adams and Jemaine Clement. Disney has not announced a digital, physical or streaming release date for the film. The reception marks a rockier follow-up to 2024’s animated “Moana 2,” which brought in more than $1 billion worldwide and ranked among that year’s highest-grossing releases.
