Dwayne Johnson has shrugged off the lukewarm response to the recent live-action remake of Moana as “just the way it goes”.
The Rock originated the role of Maui in Disney’s modern animated classic Moana, a character he also portrayed in the live-action remake, which hit cinemas earlier in the summer.
However, it’s fair to say that the new take on the beloved film (on which he also served as an executive producer) didn’t quite grab critics or audiences the same way, with many reviews calling out the movie’s appearance and branding it a “soulless” cash-grab.
“Our first two reviews came out [and] I’ll never forget it… They were amazing,” Johnson recalled to People magazine. “I was like, ‘wow’.”
Then, he claimed, things “went another way… as sometimes happens”.
He then conceded: “That’s just the way it goes because we’re in this business.”
“If you love it, great. If you don’t, no problem,” Johnson added of his latest film, adding that, to him, “what really mattered” was that “the culture really stood up”.
At the time of writing, the 2026 take on Moana holds an unenviable 38% critical score on the reviews aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes, while it holds an average score of 2.7 stars from Letterboxd users.
One part of the new Moana movie that had people talking before the film had even been released was the long wig the usually-bald star wore in order to bring Maui to life in live-action form.
“I laughed so fucking hard, when we first came out and people saw me in a wig for the first time, and they memed me,” he claimed last month.
“The internet did the internet. It was very, very funny. I was like, ‘OK, it’s alright, just see the movie, wait till you see it’.”
Moana is still in cinemas now.
