Quietly Watching

  Since 2023, no movie has been streamed in American homes more than the animated Moana. Nielsen clocked it above eleven billion minutes that year, then watched the number climb even higher in 2024, nearly a decade after the film left theaters. Those are the households Disney invited back this month, asking them to pay full price for a live-action version of a story they can recite line for line. Most of them stayed home. The remake opened to 43 million dollars domestically and 95 million worldwide, numbers that would look respectable on an original film and look like a wreck on a 250 million dollar production. The early autopsies blame the reviews, or Dwayne Johnson, or remake fatigue in general. I think the Nielsen chart explains it better than any of those. Nostalgia needs a gap to grow in, and the original Moana was never gone long enough to leave one. The Weekend the Formula Broke The details are unkind in a very specific way. Deadline reports the film cost 250 million dollars...

Moana arrives in theaters on July 10, a decade after the animated film that made her one of Disney's most beloved heroines. The reviews are already out, and they are split down the middle: one outlet calls it a low point in Disney's relentless remake run, another calls it one of the studio's better live-action attempts. Both can be true at once, and the reason they can is the most interesting thing about this movie. Here is the question I keep coming back to. When the original already looked this real, what is a live-action remake actually for? What the Animation Already Did The 2016 Moana was, visually, one of the high-water marks of computer animation. The ocean had weight. Light moved through water the way it moves through real water. When critics say the new version "runs aground" against garish backdrops and barely distinguishable CG, the problem is bigger than any one shot. The new film chases realism in a story that already looked completely real, so there ...

  Toy Story 4 ended with a decision that felt, at the time, like a conclusion. Woody chose to stay behind with Bo Peep, giving up his place with Bonnie and the other toys to live as a lost toy — free, unclaimed, no longer defined by a child's need for him. It was a gentle, bittersweet ending for a character who had spent four films learning to let go. Toy Story 5, opening in theaters on June 19, brings him back. And the reason he comes back says a great deal about what this film is actually about. <The Setup> The premise has been described as "Toy meets Tech." Bonnie receives a new tablet device called Lilypad — voiced by Greta Lee — and Lilypad arrives with her own ideas about what is best for the children she serves. The existing toys, Buzz (Tim Allen), Jessie (Joan Cusack), and the rest of the gang, find their purpose and their place threatened not by a new toy but by something that operates on entirely different logic. Woody, drawn out of his self-imposed exile ...