Moana 2 was never meant to be a record breaking Thanksgiving holiday release, but here we are. The movie actually began conceptually as a series for Disney+, but somewhere along the line they decided to make it a feature length release. Even the voices behind Moana and Maui, Auli’i Cravalho and The Rock, didn’t sign on to reprise their roles until February of 2024. So, why did they decide to scrap the show and make it a movie?
DiscussingFilm has posted a new video of Moana 2 director David Derrick Jr. explaining what the movie would have done differently than the series. In the sequel, Moana forms a group of villagers to go on her journey with her this time. This detail was a sharp contrast to the original adventure that saw Moana and Maui as the only human adventurers. And to be fair, the crew in this second movie seemed like they were an after thought as they didn’t really do much. We now know the reason for this is that they originally planned to expand on these character in the series:
“When it was in a series we got to focus on the crew members in depth in a way that helped inform how they would fit in the feature films, it was almost an inverse.”
According to Derrick Jr., they were going to originally use the extra episode time to really flesh out the new characters, but since they changed it to a two hour movie they no longer had the time to allocated to those details. “In the series we spent more time with the crew, but we got to know them better,” Derrick Jr. continues. One of my personal criticisms of the movie is that the first portion, before Moana reconnects with Maui, does feel rushed and that there was a lot more involved with the village that they did not get a chance to show. It sounds as if they originally had the idea to do more with these ancillary characters in the future and they were going to use the series as a way to build that foundation.
As it stands right now, Moana 2 didn’t need to be a series and actually ended up fairing much better as a feature film. The movie brought in over $200M (probably closer to $300M at the time of writing this) domestically, and somewhere around the $350M mark internationally. The movie broke the record held by The Super Mario Bros. Movie for highest grossing animated holiday release, and set the record for highest grossing holiday release of all time.
Have you seen Moana 2 yet? Make sure you can while it’s still in theaters!