Move over, ‘Supergirl’: ‘Vaiana’ is Hollywood’s next super-flop, and it more than deserves it

Hollywood is going through strange times. Strange, but curious, of course: after the surprise success of Backrooms and Obsession and the stumble of Supergirl, which hasn’t managed to get off the ground for DC Studios, there’s another disconnect between the box office and audiences: Moana, the live-action remake, doesn’t seem to interest anyone and is already on its way to becoming the worst opening for one of these movies at the box office. And you know what? It had it coming.

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Apparently, box-office projections for this weekend don’t even hit $40 million in the United States, and even lower overseas, a terrible blow for a movie that cost $250 million and was being billed as Disney’s big summer success (aside from, of course, Spider-Man). It has arrived too soon, when nobody was asking for it and after a Moana 2 that even the most die-hard fans of the first one didn’t like all that much. I mean, the flop was inevitable.

After all, if you have the same movie on Disney+ and it’s still tremendously popular, why go see it in theaters? No matter how delighted audiences may be when they leave the theater, critics have torn it apart and most people, at best, will wait for it to hit streaming. Does this mean there’s a change in Hollywood? Are we facing a new golden age for original cinema? You never know. All we can do is cross our fingers.

It’s true that the position it’s put itself in, between Toy Story 5, Minions & Monsters and The Odyssey, isn’t going to help Moana, but Disney can learn several things from this failure, like, for example, that it can limit live-action remakes to the movies that can really benefit from them, like Lilo & Stitch. $250 million down the drain. And that’s how it goes.