Live-action Moana was projected to open at $85 million.It opened at $18 million.That is a disappointing weekend for Disney. That is a 79 percent shortfall against your own studio’s expectations, on a film that may ultimately lose more than $100 million. Numbers like that do not come from one bad decision. They come from several things going wrong at once, and when a studio executive finally addresses it publicly, the interesting part is which of those things they name.Dana Walden, Disney’s President and Chief Creative Officer, addressed it this week at Bloomberg’s Screentime, in a conversation that also covered Jimmy Kimmel’s future at ABC and this year’s layoffs.Her explanation for Moana names one factor. It is a real factor. It is also not the biggest one.Credit: DisneyWhat Walden Said About MoanaWalden attributed the film’s performance to its proximity to Moana 2, the animated sequel released in November 2024.“It’s so competitive right now that you have to have the right film at the right time, with audiences feeling a certain degree of demand,” she said. “I would say our live-action Moana, which is excellent, I think it was hurt by the proximity to our second animated version of Moana, which came together under unusual circumstances, but premiered about 18 months before this one. So perhaps there was not enough time to create a lot of pent-up demand for another film.”That argument holds up as far as it goes. Audiences had seen Moana recently. Demand had not had time to rebuild.Credit: DisneyWhat the Explanation SkipsTwo things, and both are larger.The first is the reviews. Live-action Moana did not land well with critics, and its Rotten Tomatoes score reflected that. A film opening at a fifth of its projection is usually a film that word of mouth killed in the first 48 hours, which is a quality problem rather than a scheduling problem.The second is harder to miss. Toy Story 5 was in the market at roughly the same time, and it crossed $1 billion globally, becoming one of Disney’s strongest releases of the year.Credit: PixarSo Disney had a billion-dollar animated family film actively competing for the exact same audience in the same window.Walden cited an animated Disney movie from 18 months earlier as the problem. She did not mention the animated Disney movie from that same month that was taking in a billion dollars.That omission is the most notable thing about the answer.The Question the Answer RaisesThere is a structural issue buried in Walden’s reasoning that applies well beyond this one film.If live-action Moana failed because it came too soon after the animated version, then what is the correct interval?Every Disney live-action remake is, by definition, proximate to a beloved animated original. That is the entire premise. The strategy depends on audiences wanting to see a familiar story again, which means the gap between versions is always the central variable.Eighteen months was evidently too short. Nobody has said what is long enough, and Disney has more remakes in its pipeline.On Jimmy Kimmel, the Answer Is Not YesAsked whether Kimmel will return to ABC next year, Walden said she is working on it.“It’s a very challenging daypart, late-night,” she said. “That’s not to say that Jimmy is not doing a phenomenal job, and his ratings are up, but they’re up relative to a smaller audience that’s watching late night on broadcast television.”She noted that millions watch Kimmel on YouTube, which may not be the most lucrative outcome for the show, and framed the decision around three questions. “What does Jimmy want? What’s the right thing to do, and what’s the right thing for our business?”Read that carefully. It is an entirely economic answer.Credit: ABCWhat it does not mention is the context every viewer already knows. Kimmel was briefly suspended in September 2025 following a comment about the killing of Charlie Kirk, then returned to air in under a week after backlash. Nexstar and Sinclair stopped preempting the show days later. Disney investors demanded records explaining the suspension decision. Disney then extended Kimmel’s deal through 2027.In April of this year, the FCC announced it would review Disney’s ABC licenses two years early. The commission tied that to its investigation of Disney’s DEI initiatives, but the order arrived one day after President Trump called for Kimmel’s firing over a joke about Melania Trump. A group of former FCC officials later described the early license review as “an assault on free speech.”Against all of that, answering a question about Kimmel’s future purely in terms of daypart economics and YouTube monetization is a choice. Whether it reflects the actual decision-making or a reluctance to discuss regulatory pressure publicly is not something anyone outside Disney can determine.But “I’m working on it” is not a renewal.On Layoffs, One Characterization Deserves ScrutinyWalden also addressed this year’s job cuts, the most recent of which affected a few hundred employees, largely in technology and human resources.“I think, like all of our similarly situated competitors, and certainly all of our competitors in the tech industry, there is a need to constantly evaluate how you’re structured,” she said. “How big is the organization?”Then came the line worth examining.“This past round was a voluntary retirement program, which was extremely generous and gave a number of our long-tenured executives agency and the opportunity to make their own decisions around whether the timing was right to leave or to stay.”Here is the issue. Disney did offer a voluntary early retirement program, reported in August, aimed at director-level executives and above. That program was real and was described accurately as an elective.The round that followed in late September was reported as cuts affecting a few hundred employees, concentrated in tech and HR. That is a different action, and nothing in the reporting described it as voluntary.Describing the most recent round as a voluntary retirement program collapses two separate events into one and makes involuntary reductions sound like a choice employees made. It may simply be imprecision in a live interview rather than anything deliberate. But the distinction matters enormously to the people in it.The Year in ContextThis has been a sustained pattern rather than a series of isolated decisions.Roughly 1,000 employees were cut in April, after Josh D’Amaro succeeded Bob Iger as CEO. Hundreds more followed in July across Pixar, ESPN, and National Geographic. August brought the voluntary retirement offers. September brought the tech and HR reductions.Walden’s framing of why is straightforward enough. “This evolution will never stop, technology set their sights on our business, and we must survive and thrive and grow, and that’s what we’re going to do.”Credit: DisneyThat is the strategy stated plainly. For the people counting rounds rather than reading transcripts, it also reads as a warning that the counting is not finished.Source: Dana Walden’s remarks at Bloomberg’s Screentime, as reported by Variety.The post Dana Walden Blames ‘Moana 2’ for the Live-Action ‘Moana’ Flop, While Confirming Company Layoffs appeared first on Inside the Magic.