The Disney Movie That Should Have Been Made With AI

Disney is famous for innovation, but the new 'Moana' remake has generated criticism for a lack of originality. (Photo by RONDA CHURCHILL/AFP via Getty Images)

AFP via Getty Images

Few genres of film have been as much of a gamble for Disney as the live-action remakes of its classic cartoons. Last year alone, Lilo & Stitch grossed $1 billion and became almost as beloved as the animated original while Snow White lost an estimated $170 million and cast a dark spell on the studio due to a slew of negative coverage. The latest addition to Disney’s stable is coming for Snow White’s crown as the criticism of it is so harsh that it raises the question of whether it would have been better to make the movie with Artificial Intelligence (AI).

The movie in question is Moana, starring newcomer Catherine Laga’aia as the eponymous Polynesian teenager who joins demigod Maui, played by Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson, on a seafaring adventure to restore prosperity to her people. Johnson voiced the character in the 2016 computer animated original but that’s far from the only similarity between the two films.

Although the movie debuts today it has already been panned by critics for its lack of originality. “Much of the film is shot-for-shot, line of dialogue-by-line of dialogue a veritable clone,” wrote Deadline. For the same reason, Digital Spy’s review described it as “the most pointless Disney live-action remake yet” and The Wrap even highlighted this in its headline saying “It’s the Same Film, Disney Just Wants You to Pay for It Again”.

This cynicism was a common thread in the reviews with entertainment journalists noting that the remake was released soon after the original in order to squeeze yet more money out of the movie which had already spawned a successful sequel in 2024. “Any live-action remake from Disney’s canon does beggar the question of ‘why,’” wrote Deadline adding that “‘because it brings in money,’ is an answer as obvious as it is depressing.”

Perhaps the greatest irony is that Disney may be on track to lose money on Moana rather than make a profit on it.

Live-action adaptations were once easy box office hits but as they have become more common, studios have had to walk an increasingly fine line to stand a chance of success. On the one hand, the more they stray from the source material, the more they risk alienating fans of the originals. On the other, the closer they stick to the source material, the greater the risk that they will be accused of adding nothing new.

This is a post-pandemic phenomena as audiences are now used to streaming movies without paying for each film. It has made consumers much more picky about which movies to pay to watch at the theater. Although Disney’s live-action adaptations are aimed at children, parents of course are the ones who are buying the tickets so if they don’t like the look of a film, they won’t pay for a ticket, especially in this tough economic climate. It is a particular problem for Disney as its cute and cuddly cartoon characters generally don’t translate well into a live action setting.

The Little Mermaid was widely criticized for the eerie appearance of the creatures which inhabit its undersea world. “There’s something about these depictions that triggers an uneasy response,” wrote Vox. “Maybe it’s the prolonged, lingering shots on their ‘smiling’ faces or that their tiny mouths are contorted in unnatural ways. It’s as though there’s almost something sinister hiding underneath the computerized animal skin – and that’s even before they start singing and dancing.”

Likewise, Johnson’s appearance in Moana has attracted widespread online criticism and ridicule with the largest wave of mockery centered on Maui’s long, curly hair. Observers have complained that the wig looks unnatural and cheap, magnified by the fact that despite Johnson’s muscular frame, he wears a plastic-looking body suit in the movie to try and match Maui’s oversized proportions. It doesn’t appear to be going down well.

A Wash Out At The Box Office?

Early estimates suggested that Moana would have a healthy $80 million to $105 million domestic opening but those forecasts have sunk in the wake of the excoriating assessment from critics who have given the film an average rating of just 38% on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes.

According to Variety, tracking services now forecast that the movie will actually debut to between $60 million and $65 million giving it ticket sales that are barely above the original, which opened to $56 million. Moreover, it is only a fraction of Moana 2’s domestic haul, which was a massive $139.7 million over its first three days.

However, Variety’s report warns that some exhibitors believe Moana could generate as little as $40 million domestically on opening which would yield a worldwide gross of just $115 million as $75 million at most is expected from overseas markets. Studios retain around half of the box office takings so this would give Disney just $58 million from the movie’s opening when takings are usually around their peak.

Variety described that outcome as “catastrophic” given that Moana carries an estimated $250 million budget without including Disney’s hefty global marketing spend. It’s a salutary reminder that box office isn’t the be-all-and-end-all for investors. Last month Disney boasted that it had become the first Hollywood studio in 2026 to surpass $3 billion at the worldwide box office but that seems hollow if it ends up making a loss on a high-profile movie like Moana.

The higher the budget, the more moviegoers are needed for the picture to break even. Moana will need to make waves to attract them.

The evidence for this is in the graph below which is based on information from internet search giant Google. Its Google Trends service analyzes the popularity of top queries though the results don’t reveal the number of searches for a specific term. Instead, each point on the graph is relative to the others on a scale of zero to 100. A score of 50 means there were half as many searches for the term on that date than there were when it hit 100, which represents peak popularity. In contrast, a score of zero relates to the lowest number of search enquiries during the given time.

Google processes more than five trillion inquiries annually giving it a 90% share of the market so the results are as comprehensive as can be. Crucially, Google Trends captures as many of them as possible as it is not case sensitive and shows worldwide search inquiries.

It is possible to narrow the search down to this year’s Moana movie but in order to get the clearest indication of the popularity of the franchise over time, the most logical term to use is simply ‘Moana’. The results show that despite the release of the live-action adaptation, there have been far fewer searches for Moana during July than in December 2016 and December 2024 soon after the first and second movies debuted. The former has a Google Trends score of 90 and the latter hit 100 whereas it currently stands at just 48.

Granted, it is only early in the month but the movie is released today so you would expect the searches to be surging. It still has time to turn the tide but it remains to be seen whether it will do it.

The Quarter Of A Billion Dollar Question

There could be good reason why audiences aren’t searching for Moana a great deal now: there is no call for the film. It’s not long since the animated original debuted and its live-action counterpart does nothing new. So what is the point in spending a quarter of a billion dollars on making it, especially when the end result has been repeatedly compared to an AI production?

The Daily Telegraph joked that it felt like someone just typed the animated scenes into an AI video generator while Deadline wrote that it had “animation that is barely distinguishable from AI.” Mashable added that “it evoked in me a similar reaction to AI slop, where I cringe at the unnerving blend of the familiar and the not-quite-right.”

All jokes aside, Disney could do a lot worse than use AI to make live action adaptations which don’t change the source material at all.

In short, Generative AI can be used to create content, such as text, images, audio or video, based on patterns it learns from massive amounts of existing data. It can produce photorealistic videos as their components are derived from existing footage and the program can also predict the next element in a sequence, like a word, a pixel or a sound.

With billions of online videos to draw from, Generative AI programs can create scenes showing anything in a matter of seconds. They aren’t rendering each frame in 3D in a sequence as traditional animators and visual effects artists do. Instead, the AI program forecasts what the frame will look like and all it requires is the user to enter a text prompt which describes what they are looking for. The more detailed and precise the prompt, the closer the result will be to the request.

It has led to a torrent of so-called AI slop – bizarre videos showing everything from Elvis Presley in Star Wars to Stephen Hawking winning WWE wrestling matches. Many of the clips are indistinguishable from reality even though they are entirely artificial. This is why it has cast a dark spell on the movie industry and its influence is only growing.

The Way Of The Future

Last year London-based production house Particle 6 unveiled a photorealistic AI actress called Tilly Norwood and just a few days ago announced the first film that the creation will appear in – a dramedy called Misaligned. Uniqueness isn’t the only reason for this sudden interest. All it takes is the push of a button to give the character a different hair color, skin color, eyes or accent. There’s no need for any makeup or training giving it tremendous versatility at a low cost.

There’s no doubt that it’s eerie but it seems to be the way of the future given the vast sums that are being invested in AI. For obvious reasons, many actors are up in arms with Mary Poppins star Emily Blunt saying “good Lord, we’re screwed” when she was shown a news report about Norwood. “That is really, really scary. Come on, agencies, don’t do that. Please stop. Please stop taking away our human connection.”

In contrast, a number of directors have voiced support for AI as they can see benefits. “I can’t see a reason why you wouldn’t become interested in this stuff as a filmmaker. It’s so clearly a tool that might be up there with the camera. It’s going to be be better than CGI [Computer Generated Imagery],” said Jurassic World: Rebirth director Gareth Edwards recently. Peter Jackson added “I don’t dislike it at all. I mean, to me, it’s just a special effect.”

Some actors have expressed a sense of resignation towards AI. “AI is here. So to fight it is to fight a battle that we will lose,” said Demi Moore. “I do feel that there’s a place for it,” added Sandra Bullock. “It’s here. We have to observe it. We have to understand it. We have to lean into it. We have to use it in a really constructive and creative way, make it our friend.”

If actors and studios don’t do that, fans may do it anyway. As Matthew McConaughey recently explained, AI enables fans to digitally insert movie stars into personal events from the other side of the world without even asking.

In an attempt to get an AI platform onside, Disney announced a tie-up with OpenAI’s Sora video generation tool last year and although the partnership bit the dust when the platform closed earlier this year, the Mouse reportedly still wants to enter into a similar deal. Other studios have already signed AI deals of a different kind.

Michael Caine’s voice has been recreated using AI to narrate a new audiobook of The Odyssey to coincide with the release of the movie this month. Likewise, Netflix has recreated the voice of late legendary actor Gene Wilder for a Willy Wonka competition series. Appropriate permission was obtained in advance in both cases as it was for production of the movie As Deep as the Grave which features an AI performance from the late Val Kilmer. Film makers used footage, photos and voice recordings to help craft his performance.

Artificial Intelligence. Actual Savings

To give an indication of the effect that AI can have on the bottom line, consider that it took 800,000 machine hours for Disney’s Pixar division to create 1995’s Toy Story as it had 114,240 frames of animation. However, an AI video generator could create a computer animated movie with a similar length and visual standard in around 400 minutes on a high-end cloud server cluster. If the project was split across separate high-end GPU nodes for each minute of the movie, the entire film could be rendered in under ten minutes. However, that’s not the end of the story.

If you just hit ‘generate’ and walked away, the resulting film would face significant production issues. For example, one of the characters might start the movie dressed in a certain way but by the end it could have warped into a completely different appearance. Likewise, the layout of the rooms could change and because the AI would generate the video separately from the audio, the lips would need to be manually matched, frame by frame, to the pre-recorded voice tracks.

‘Pre-training’ the AI program can fix a number of these issues but in turn, this requires doing some of the work that the program is designed to avoid. For example, if a 3D wireframe animation skeleton with exact physics, depth maps and camera movements is fed into a pre-trained AI, the program can simply render the textures, lighting and photorealistic skin on top making the end result much more stable. However, this requires the wireframe skeletons, depth maps and camera movements to be created and planned before the AI can get to work.

Of course, by its very nature, AI is learning every second as more of these videos are created so the processing time and caliber of the output are continually improving.

Nevertheless, even pre-training the AI takes considerably less time than rendering each frame by scratch, as was the case with Toy Story, or filming from scratch as happened with Moana. Feeding the entire Moana computer animated movie into a video generator would give the program more than enough information, especially if it was instructed to ensure that the the end result was no different to the original. It would cost a fraction of the amount that Disney spent on its live-action adaptation and could end up looking better. And if it didn’t, all Disney would need to do is type in some prompts and run the program again.

Sure, it would be lazy but so is copying the original shot for shot. Not even all the animals in the live action version look realistic with Moana’s chicken companion Heihei looking clearly computer generated. Ironically, inserting an obviously computer generated character into a photorealistic setting is exactly the kind of thing you find in AI slop videos.

Ultimately, the AI version would stand a greater chance of making a profit, due to its dramatically lower cost, so there would be less risk of wasting stockholders’ funds. Fans can create the movie themselves in AI, so by not doing this, Disney is opening the door being shown up by independent creators. In other words, it’s a lose-lose.

It’s no secret that there are some things computers can do better than humans and converting animated footage into live action is one of AI’s strengths. Of course, using AI isn’t the only solution. An alternative is walking that fine line and deviating from the source material in ways which justify the switch to live action filming. If it can’t be justified then it raises the question about whether the live action version should go ahead at all which is precisely what some critics say should have been asked about Moana.