Franchise ubiquity, however, probably worked against the new “Moana” movie, box office analysts said.
Disney has long been Hollywood’s master of movie franchise management, and scarcity is central to its strategy. In the 1990s, the company created the “Disney vault,” routinely pulling animated classics from home video for years at a time to manufacture exclusivity. (“Hurry, the vault closes soon!”) More recently, it let nearly a decade pass between “Toy Story 4” and last month’s blockbuster “Toy Story 5.” Ticket buyers had time to miss Woody and Buzz.
On average, Disney has waited 27 years before remaking one of its animated classics as a live-action movie, according to David A. Gross, a film consultant who publishes a newsletter on box office numbers. (He described the weekend results for “Moana” as “weak,” noting that Disney’s live-action remakes have opened to an average of about $92 million in domestic theaters.)
In recent years, however, Disney has occasionally abandoned its own playbook. Under pressure to feed Disney+ and squeeze more value from franchises like Marvel and “Star Wars,” the company flooded the market. Hence a third stand-alone “Ant-Man” movie, which disappointed at the box office. In the case of “Star Wars,” Disney acknowledged that pushing its Lucasfilm division to crank out a new movie every year had been a mistake.
Disney’s decision to make a live-action “Moana” so soon was partly because it had run out of animated classics from earlier decades to remake. Since 2010, the company has done “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” “Cinderella,” “Alice in Wonderland,” “Dumbo,” “The Lion King,” “Aladdin,” “Lady and the Tramp,” “Mulan,” “Pinocchio,” “The Jungle Book,” “Peter Pan,” “The Little Mermaid” and “Lilo & Stitch.”
