It won’t have Lin-Manuel Miranda doing the music, which is a mark against it, but I’ll wait for the trailer. And “Moana 2” is a pretty weak title. Give me something catchier.
Disney has been making direct-to-video sequels to its animated hits for decades; it’s releasing one of them in the theaters because business has been bad and it needs a hit. I don’t expect this one to be better than any of the others.
It’s actually weirder than that. It’s not a DTV sequel being redirected to cinemas, it started out as a TV series which is being radically rethought for big-screen release with a shockingly fast turnaround.
Disney is such a mess right now. Five years ago they were on top of the world, but the wheels have suddenly come off. The Star Wars franchise is a dumpster fire, Marvel has driven off a cliff, their 100th-anniversary animated film was a bomb and wasn’t even nominated in its Oscar category.
I adore the original Moana (or Vaiana as it’s known here), but this kind of last-minute massive reconstructive surgery on a TV show to make it workable as a movie is a pure desperation move.
(And don’t forget they also have the live-action adaptation of the first movie in parallel development. Crimony, what a cluster.)
They’ll have a hard time topping Aladdin IV: Jafar May Need Glasses.
That’s basically what they did with Aladdin: Return of Jafar. They took what was supposed to be the first few episodes of the TV show and made them one movie.
Tale as old as time.
Is a Beauty and the Beast song; that movie also got a sequel, which was three episodes from a potential TV show stiched together as three unrelated stories set at some point after Belle and the Beast start having feelings for each other but before the curse is lifted.
I think it’s a different phenomenon with Tarzan, especially since the Tarzan TV show was set post-movie, with Jane staying in the jungle and Europeans or natives showing up every other week (where were they the whole time Tarzan was growing up*, I wonder??). Tarzan 2 is set when Tarzan was still a kid. My theory: they did all this character work on young Tarzan, Terk, Tantor, etc; but Tarzan is a baby for the opening sequence and only appears as a child briefly before growing up during the Son of Man montage. And he becomes competent at jungle life during the montage, so aside from a couple shots of him training before growing up, we never see Young Tarzan as a badass jungle survivor.
*I did read the books, where Tarzan is kind of an asshole in a whole lot of ways, one of which is the fact that he regilarly sees native people and even fights and kills them, but it never occurs to him that they are people like him until Europeans show up.
Also, I do remember other sequels hitting theaters. Jungle Book 2 did, and it was pushed heavily at the time (this was right before we moved to the States, but if we had it in theaters and we had the McDonald’s toys too, so did you guys!)
Should have been produced by Spike Lee and called Moana Blues.
They only made them from 1994 (Return of Jafar) to 2008 (The Little Mermaid: Ariel’s Beginning.) When John Lasseter became Disney’s Chief Creative Officer he ended the practice and after that sequels have been released in the theater.
Which one? I know they’re releasing COVID era Pixar films that went straight to Disney+
Moana Returns
2 Fast 2 Moana
Moana Into Darkness
Moana II: Your Sister is a Werewolf
Moana 2: Electric Hei Hei
Moana 2: Waterworld
Between this and his wrestling moves The Rock is really putting himself in the spotlight again.
Moana 2: The Legend of Tamatoa’s Gold
That’s not all that weird. That was how many of the sequels were created. And not just like Aladdin where the sequels were the start and end of a TV series. Scrapped animated TV series would be repurposed all the time I to home movie releases. It avoids wasting all that work.
The weird part is that they’re doing that and releasing it theatrically. And that they are calling it Moana 2, making it seem like a mainstream release rather than some side movie. Do they really think what they have is that good, or are they, as you say, desperate to get something in the theaters?
Yes, that is the important part. They need something in cinemas they can count on because too much else is falling flat. And they need it in a hurry.
Mo Ana Mo Problems.
Ah a Frozen crossover!
For a Few Sand Dollars More
And given they already have much of it done as a streaming show, for relatively cheap.
Part of their problem isn’t that their movies have done so poorly, but that they cost so much that the bar for doing well is absurdly high.
This is much more likely to have a positive ROI. They need that more than a big hit. They have swung for the fences, this one will be fine if it just gets on base.
Plus it ramps back up all the Moana merchandise sales.
What film was that? I haven’t heard of this at all (which maybe is part of their problem?)