Moana (2026): Cast, Plot, Ending Explained and Review

Disney’s live-action Moana opened in cinemas on Friday 10 July 2026, ten years almost to the week after the animated film it retells. Catherine Laga’aia plays Moana in her first screen role. Dwayne Johnson returns as Maui.

Two things get misreported about this film constantly, so let’s deal with them before anything else. Auli’i Cravalho — the voice of the 2016 Moana — is not in it. And the ending, which critics describe as near-identical to the original, quietly adds one scene the animated film never had.

Everything below was checked on 10 July 2026, the day the film opened.

When does Moana (2026) come out, and how can I watch it?

The world premiere was held at the Hollywood Bowl on Wednesday 8 July, played live to the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and the review embargo lifted the same day. That matters for what follows: real critics have genuinely seen this film, so the ending details below come from people who watched it rather than from the 2016 version.

On streaming, be careful what you read. Disney has announced nothing. Outlets predicting an October arrival are extrapolating from Disney’s usual theatrical window, not reporting a date.

The film was originally set for June 2025 and pushed back a year after Disney decided to widen the gap with the animated Moana 2.

Moana 2026 cast: who plays whom

On screen

Voice

Young Moana is played by two child actors, Amaya Masoli and Emma Puahi-Shapazian. We do not list social accounts for minors.

A note on the handles above: Dwayne Johnson’s account is @therock, not his name — a reminder that a handle can never be guessed from a person’s name. Where we could not tie an account to the actor through a source, we have said so instead of printing a plausible-looking guess.

The Auli’i Cravalho question

This is the single most-misreported fact about the film, and the marketing is partly responsible.

Auli’i Cravalho does not appear on screen. She does not voice a character. She is an executive producer, and she sings on the new end-credits song alongside Laga’aia and Johnson — which is why the song was promoted as a conversation between two Moanas, and why so many people concluded she must be in the film.

Two related corrections:

• Temuera Morrison is not in this film. He voiced Chief Tui in the 2016 animated film. The live-action role went to John Tui.
• Only two performers reprise their 2016 roles: Dwayne Johnson as Maui, and Jemaine Clement as the voice of Tamatoa. Alan Tudyk, who vocalised Heihei in 2016, did not return.

Who is Catherine Laga’aia?

She is a 19-year-old Samoan-Australian actor from Sydney, born on 17 December 2006, and this is her first film. Her father is the New Zealand-Australian actor Jay Laga’aia. Her grandfather came from Fa’aala, Palauli on Savai’i; her grandmother from Leulumoega Tuai on Upolu.

Disney has said she was chosen from more than 32,000 audition tapes.

The plot, without spoilers

A prologue tells the legend: the island goddess Te Fiti gave life to the ocean, the demigod Maui stole her heart, and in the disaster that followed Te Fiti was undone, the lava demon Te Kā was unleashed, and Maui lost both the heart and his magic fishhook.

A thousand years later on Motunui, a chief’s daughter named Moana is drawn to a sea her father forbids her to cross. Her grandmother Tala reveals that their people were once voyagers. Moana sets out to find Maui and make him restore the heart.

If that sounds exactly like the 2016 film, that is because it is. Reviewers repeatedly describe the remake as a near-shot-for-shot retelling.

Moana 2026 ending explained

Spoilers from here. What follows is assembled from ending-explained pieces and reviews written by critics who attended screenings, cross-checked against each other and against the film’s plot summary. Where only one first-hand source describes a beat, we say so.

Moana finds Maui, and after a hostile start he joins her. They recover his fishhook from the giant crab Tamatoa in Lalotai, the realm of monsters. He teaches her to navigate by the stars. They are ambushed by the Kakamora, the coconut-armoured pirates, and outwit them.

At Te Fiti’s island, Te Kā attacks. Maui’s hook is badly damaged and he abandons Moana. Alone, she is visited by the spirit of her grandmother — who returns in the form of a glowing manta ray, as in 2016 — and turns back.

Then the twist, which the remake keeps intact: Te Kā is Te Fiti. The goddess did not die when the heart was stolen; she was corrupted by its absence. Moana walks to her, returns the heart, and Te Fiti is restored. She heals the blighted islands, repairs Maui’s fishhook, and sinks into a deep sleep, becoming an island herself.

The one scene the animated film never had

Here is the genuine difference. In 2016, the film cut from the restoration to a final shot of the islanders sailing out to sea; Moana’s succession was implied.

The 2026 film shows the coronation. Moana places a shell atop the stack of stones left by every chief before her, and formally takes up the role of chieftess and wayfinder. Only then does it close on the same image of a fleet putting to sea.

This is described as the biggest single change to the ending, and the film’s plot summary carries the same shell-and-stones gesture. It is the most substantive addition identified by anyone who has seen the film.

Is there a post-credits scene?

No. The credits carry a new song, and that is all.

This is itself a change. The 2016 animated film did have a post-credits gag — Tamatoa, stranded on his back, breaking the fourth wall about how he would get more help if he had a cute Jamaican accent, a wink at The Little Mermaid. The remake drops it. There is no sequel tease, and nothing from Moana 2: no Matangi, no Simea.

What is actually different from the 2016 film

Director Thomas Kail has said the film adds new dialogue and jokes and repositions scenes, and composer Mark Mancina wrote a substantial amount of new score. But no critic describes a structural reinvention.

The songs

Nine songs return from 2016, with their titles intact — including “How Far I’ll Go,” “You’re Welcome,” “Shiny,” “Where You Are,” “We Know the Way” and “I Am Moana (Song of the Ancestors).”

There is exactly one wholly new song: “Along the Way,” written by Lin-Manuel Miranda, performed by Cravalho, Laga’aia and Johnson, and played over the closing credits rather than inside the story.

Two things to get right here:

• The soundtrack contains two different tracks with similar names. Track 9, “Along The Way (Malaga Ki Ei),” is a Te Vaka song performed by the Foa’i family. Track 13, “Along the Way,” is Miranda’s new end-credits number. They are not the same piece.
• Abigail Barlow and Emily Bear did not work on this film. They wrote songs for the animated Moana 2. The 2026 credits are Miranda, Opetaia Foa’i and Mark Mancina — the 2016 team — with Mancina scoring.

The soundtrack arrived on 26 June 2026, a deluxe edition on 8 July, and the score album on opening day.

What the reviews say

The scores below are live numbers that move and the review counts grow by the hour. The pattern in them is more stable than the numbers.

“Critics hated it” is the wrong summary, and the distinction matters. A 36% aggregate paired with consistent, specific praise for the lead performance is a recognisable shape: hostility to the project, not to the execution. It is what happens when reviewers conclude the film should not exist and then have to review the people who made it anyway. Notably the reception is not unanimous either — there are outright raves in the mix, which a genuinely incompetent film does not attract.

The interval is the thing nobody can argue away. Disney’s live-action remakes have generally reached back twenty-five years or more: Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King. This one reaches back ten. The original is not a memory being restored for a new generation — it is in active rotation, on the same service, available to the same household. The usual justification for the format simply is not present here.

And the photoreal problem is mechanical rather than a matter of taste. Heihei, Pua and Tamatoa are built as caricatures. Their comedy runs on impossible proportions, on expressions no animal’s face can make, on timing that only holds when physics is optional. Rendering them realistically removes the exact property the jokes were constructed from. That outcome is predictable before a frame is shot, and it is why the criticism lands so uniformly on the same three characters.

So the score is not a surprise so much as arithmetic. Applying the live-action format to the animated film in Disney’s catalogue whose appeal is most dependent on animation was always going to produce this. The performance surviving it is the genuinely interesting result.

How Pacific critics and audiences responded

This is worth separating out, and worth being honest about: dedicated Pacific film criticism is thin, and most Pacific-community coverage we found is premiere celebration rather than review.

What exists cuts both ways. Michael Lee at The Nerds of Color scored it 8/10, praising Laga’aia and crediting Bush and the Samoan co-writer Dana Ledoux Miller with making Motunui feel lived-in — while still faulting the film for excessive fidelity. Boris Jancic at RNZ gave it two stars, and raised a sharper point: the New Zealand actors Rena Owen and John Tui were saddled with American accents, while Jemaine Clement’s crab keeps one of the thickest New Zealand accents ever committed to film.

Away from the reviews, the reception was warmer. Samoa’s premiere in Apia on 9 July closed a street in the capital and turned into a festival. Dwayne Johnson, who holds the Samoan matai title Seiuli, opened the Hollywood Bowl premiere with a song named for his family’s village district.

One more thing that needs saying carefully. Critics and fans have compared the film’s washed-out colour grading and heavy CGI to AI-generated imagery — one Telegraph critic reached for a ChatGPT comparison. That is rhetoric about how the film looks. No source establishes that generative AI was used to make it.

Is Moana the worst-reviewed Disney live-action remake?

Nearly, but the honest answer needs one qualification.

Moana is not the lowest overall — Pinocchio is. But Pinocchio went straight to Disney+ and never opened in cinemas. So the precise claim is: Moana is the lowest-scored Disney live-action remake ever released in cinemas, and second-lowest overall. Headlines calling it outright “the worst” are skipping past Pinocchio.

Read that table with care, too. Every figure moves, and the comparison scores come from Rotten Tomatoes’ own ranked guide rather than each film’s page, where a point or two of variance exists.

Box office: what is actually known today

Almost nothing, and this is where coverage is at its most misleading on opening day.

Tracking fell steadily: around $85M three weeks out, then $60–65M, then $45–55M, and after soft Thursday previews one watcher cut it to the high-$30M range. None of these is a result. The real weekend number lands around 12–13 July.

On budget: reported figures cluster around $200M–$250M, with roughly $250M the most commonly cited. Disney has confirmed no figure.

The bottom line

If you loved the 2016 film, the remake will give it back to you almost exactly, in a form most critics found flatter. If you are going for one reason, the reviews suggest it is Catherine Laga’aia. Stay for the credits song, but not for a post-credits scene — there isn’t one.

When is the live-action Moana released?

Friday 10 July 2026, in US and UK cinemas simultaneously. It runs 115 minutes and is rated PG.

Is there a post-credits scene in Moana (2026)?

No. A new Lin-Manuel Miranda song, “Along the Way,” plays over the closing credits, and that is the only reason to stay. The 2016 animated film did have a post-credits gag with Tamatoa; the remake removes it.

Does Auli’i Cravalho appear in the live-action Moana?

No. She does not appear on screen and does not voice a character. She is an executive producer and one of three singers on the end-credits song. Moana is played by Catherine Laga’aia.

How does the live-action Moana end?

Moana discovers that the lava demon Te Kā is Te Fiti, corrupted by the theft of her heart. She restores the heart, Te Fiti heals the islands and repairs Maui’s fishhook before falling into a deep sleep, and — in a scene the animated film did not have — Moana is formally crowned chief before her people take to the sea.

When will Moana (2026) be on Disney+?

No date has been announced. Predictions of an October arrival are extrapolated from Disney’s usual theatrical window, not confirmed by the studio.

More of this year’s big releases: our Toy Story 5 review , the Dune 3 cast and ending guide and The Odyssey (2026) preview .