As published in the Wall Street Journal:
It didn’t make a billion dollars at the box office. It didn’t bring home any Oscars, either. It wasn’t even the most popular Disney animated movie in the year it came out.
So how did “Moana” become the biggest movie in America?
“Moana” was released in 2016, but it’s much bigger on streaming than it ever was in theaters. It has been viewed for a total of more than 1 billion hours, according to Nielsen, which amounts to one person sitting through the movie 775 million times. Or watching “Moana” for 150,000 years straight.
And it’s somehow still getting bigger. It was one of the most-watched movies in 2020, 2021 and 2022 for U.S. audiences. Then we managed to watch more of “Moana” on Disney+ in 2023. It was both the No. 1 movie in all of streaming last year and the No. 1 movie over the past five years combined.
But it’s not just the biggest hit of Hollywood’s streaming age. It also happens to be the biggest surprise.
“A movie that came out that many years before suddenly popping—I mean, obviously it’s unprecedented,” Jared Bush, the chief creative officer of Walt Disney Animation Studios,
told me on a Zoom from Hawaii, where he was given the hardship assignment of attending the premiere of “Moana 2.”
Set in ancient Polynesia, “Moana” is the story of a brave teenage girl chosen by the ocean to save her island from a terrible blight. The daughter of the village chief, Moana hops on her boat and sets off on a voyage into the great unknown—the line where the sky meets the sea.
It was directed by Ron Clements and John Musker, who have decades of experience making some of Hollywood’s most successful movies, like Disney animated classics “The Little Mermaid” and “Aladdin.” Even they were stunned by the streaming success of their latest movie.
“I was like, ‘Whaaaaaaaat?’ ” Musker said. “I never would have guessed that.”
Nobody would have. This was a movie that finished 12th at the global box office in the year it came out, behind other animated movies like “Finding Dory,” “Zootopia” and “The Secret Life of Pets.” On the list of highest-grossing animated movies of all time, “Moana” is lower than “Kung Fu Panda 2” and “Big Hero 6.” It still won its opening weekend and made about $645 million worldwide, but “Frozen” and “Frozen 2” both made twice as much money.
“Moana” wasn’t even given a feature-length sequel at first. In fact, “Moana 2” was developed as a TV series for Disney+ before those plans were scrapped and the show was reworked for the big screen.
“The resounding note every time we screened it internally was: Why is this not a movie?” said Bush, the screenwriter for “Moana” and “Moana 2.”
Anybody who looked at the monster streaming numbers would have asked the same question. So earlier this year, Disney opened an earnings call with the unexpected announcement that “Moana 2” would be sailing into theaters after all. And box-office projections suggest the movie is going to be absolutely huge—that every kid who streamed the original will be seeing the sequel when it opens this week.
Which is why I called the people behind “Moana” before Thanksgiving to explore the mystery of its unlikely, enduring popularity. You’re welcome.
We love a great movie
Let’s start with the most intuitive theory of why “Moana” still holds up nearly a decade later.
“Moana” is one of those movies that kids see one time, then a second and third time. Before long, the whole family has seen it a hundred times. It’s also a movie that rewards a rewatch since you inevitably pick up on jokes and details that you might have missed the first hundred times.
All of the top streaming hits are children’s movies, but “Moana” stands out for its consistency and stickiness: It’s the only one that ranked in the top 10 of Nielsen’s annual streaming lists in 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023.
The movie business is unpredictable because all sorts of factors can determine success in theaters—timing, marketing, competition. And even a bad movie can outperform expectations at the box office. But only a great movie can have staying power at home.
We love a musical
Once upon a time, Disney movies got beat at the box office by rom-coms.
It’s true! “The Little Mermaid” made less money than “When Harry Met Sally…” in 1989. Only when it came out on home video in 1990 and kids could watch VHS tapes of “The Little Mermaid” anytime they wanted did the iconic children’s movie become truly massive. As it turns out, the same thing happened with “Moana” for the same reason. It’s because musicals lend themselves to repeat viewing.
“The music can help keep the movie alive,” Musker said. “If it doesn’t have music, it’s harder to burn itself into your synapses.”
Especially when that music is a collection of bangers like the “Moana” soundtrack.
If you have children under the age of 10, you’ve almost certainly heard “How Far I’ll Go,” “You’re Welcome” and the David Bowie-esque “Shiny.” Those earworms came from the mind of Lin-Manuel Miranda, the creator of “Hamilton,” who also wrote the catchy songs for “Encanto”—the No. 2 streaming movie in recent years behind “Moana.” (Miranda was not involved with “Moana 2,” which features music by the up-and-coming, Grammy-winning team of Abigail Barlow and Emily Bear.)
It’s not a coincidence that the movies atop the streaming charts are animated musicals. Once kids watch “Moana,” they want to listen to the music. And once they become obsessed with the music, they want to rewatch “Moana.”
And it’s not just kids. Those songs wriggle into the brains of everyone who hears them. You could split parents who have been subjected to countless viewings of “Moana” into two groups: the ones who will admit to knowing every word of “How Far I’ll Go” and singing along in the car—and the ones who are lying.
We love not watching a princess fall in love
The summer before “Moana” opened, Clements and Musker went to San Diego Comic-Con and revealed a secret: The main character of their movie didn’t have a love interest.
“The audience actually gasped,” Clements says.
But from the very beginning, they imagined “Moana” as a coming-of-age story. Their movie was an epic hero’s journey—a character on a quest to find herself, not her Prince Charming. They took pains “to make sure there isn’t even an inkling of any kind of romance,” Musker says.
“She’s 16 and saving the world,” said Osnat Shurer, the movie’s producer. “Who has time to date?”
The absence of a love story was a radical departure from the tropes of Disney princess movies. By the time “Moana” came out, “Frozen” had proven that audiences were ready for an unconventional story. But there was something even more subversive about Disney’s next princess movie: The heroine explicitly rejects being called a princess. “Moana is not a princess,” Bush says. “She’s a badass.”
Which makes it all the more impressive that “Moana” has generated the most U.S. subscription revenue for Disney+ of any Disney princess movie, according to research firm Parrot Analytics.
That’s because it has broad crossover appeal. Both girls and boys can relate to Moana—“a very aspirational character,” Bush says. They find her to be courageous and fearless. And they find Maui to be humongous and completely hilarious. Of course they do. The character voiced by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson is a shapeshifting, tattooed demigod with a magical hook. “Maui,” he tells Moana, “is a hero to all.”
And he really means all.
“What we try to do,” Bush says, “is tell a story that will resonate with literally everybody around the entire planet.”
We love water
It also helps that “Moana” is sunnier, brighter and a whole lot warmer than “Frozen.”
“There’s something very evocative about the South Pacific—the islands, the ocean, the beauty,” Clements said. “You feel like you’re going on vacation when you see the movie.”
Soon after Disney+ launched in late 2019, people were stuck inside and could only dream about going on a vacation, and the vibrant world of “Moana” provided an escape during the Covid-19 pandemic. We’re still watching it today because of something that many of us have in common with Moana herself: We are drawn to water.
We open Disney+, click on “Moana” and let the visuals wash over us. The water is subliminally compelling and so downright hypnotic that parents, babies and even pets can’t help but stare at the screen. The water is also the reason that “Moana” required more computer-generated effects than any animated movie in Disney’s history.
“When we began the first ‘Moana,’ we actually did not have the technology to bring the ocean to life,” Bush said. “The people on the technical side had to invent it—and we all had to cross our fingers.”
The result was an astonishing level of detail and overall aesthetic that proved irresistible—a “blue-sky effect,” as Shurer called it.
“When your setting is really beautiful, even parents don’t mind it playing in the background over and over,” she said. “It makes you feel—ahhhh.”
We love to stream movies—over and over
One of the many peculiar things about the most popular streaming movie is that it’s not on the most popular streamer.
At least not any more. But before Disney+ existed, “Moana” was available on Netflix in 2017 and 2018. By the time Disney’s rival streamer launched in late 2019, there was already a huge audience that had been primed to watch and rewatch Disney movies whenever they wanted. And many of them chose to watch “Moana,” if only because they couldn’t watch “Frozen,” which never made it to Netflix in the U.S.
Back then, Netflix wasn’t publishing its own data about what people watched and for how long, so it remained a secret that “Moana” had become a smash hit at home.
But as soon as their streamer went live, it became clear to Disney executives that “Moana” was going to be much, much bigger in living rooms than it ever had been in theaters.
And when Nielsen began releasing weekly top 10s for streaming viewership in 2020, “Moana” was on the list and it’s been there for 60% of the weeks since.
I suspected there was some kind of hidden explanation for the movie’s seemingly inexplicable second life, but the company’s executives insist that its success was entirely organic—and I now believe them. It’s all but impossible to artificially, algorithmically manufacture a hit streaming movie because it depends on people feeling a natural urge to watch it again. And again. And again.
“It’s not something that you can make happen,” Bush said. “A swell of interest is something that has to be homegrown.”
And when that does happen, there’s just no telling how far a movie will go.
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