Moana Flopped. Now What? Here’s What We Think Dwayne Johnson Should Do Next

We all knew that the live-action remake of Disney’s Moana was happening way too soon. Why do this with a film that was only a decade old? But most of us still expected the film to do well at the box office. After all, it was a beloved film and its core audience had come out in droves for a pretty meh sequel. And they had Dwayne Johnson back as Maui, complete with a terrible wig! What more would fans want? Well, not this, apparently. Moana only earned $43 million domestically over the weekend, falling short of the $60 million that Disney was expecting.

I must admit that I’m surprised the Moana remake wasn’t a runaway box office hit. Yes, it’s way too early to give it the live-action redo treatment but I felt the same way about Lilo & Stitch and that movie made over $1 billion. Granted, it was better reviewed but when has critical disdain ever stopped Disney from making money? The studio clearly thought that this new Moana would be a cash-printing machine. It feels like Dwayne Johnson was relying on it being so. Five or six years ago, its commercial success wouldn’t have been up in the air. But this is a new era of the artist formerly known as The Rock, and it feels as though his reputation as a figure of water-tight is in a state of flux.

Post-lockdown, Johnson’s career has been in an erratic state. Before that, he had earned a reputation as the king of the action blockbuster, the man nicknamed “franchise Viagra” for his ability to join a flagging series and inject it with renewed commercial clout. It turned him into a figure of such universal likeability that “Dwayne Johnson for President” became a thing people said totally seriously. The COVID-19 restrictions caused massive damage to the industry, and we may not fully understand the extent of it for a while. Johnson was something of a casualty. Jungle Cruise, which Disney hoped would be as big as Pirates of the Caribbean, arrived with barely a splash. Black Adam was hyped as the turning point of the entire DCEU and it stumbled thanks to middling reviews and the franchise’s continuing woes. Even die-hard fans of the DC Universe couldn’t figure out why the entire series was suddenly bending over to accommodate this villain who Johnson wasn’t even playing as fully adversarial because it went against his good guy image. And as for Red One… woof. The Rock (registered trademark) brand had never felt weaker or more inessential.

Johnson entered 2025 with big plans to change things up. He was going to be “a real actor.” The industry was convinced from day one that his first foray into “serious” acting in decades, Benny Safdie’s The Smashing Machine, would quickly elevate Johnson to For Your Consideration territory with awards bodies. The Academy loves it when a blockbuster man gets dramatic, more so when he’s in prosthetics and playing a real person (in this case, the former MMA fighter Mark Kerr.) His contemporaries would want the opportunity to celebrate someone who’s made such a seismic impact on the business. He is one of the most impactful stars in the film world of the 21st century, after all.

But The Smashing Machine, despite a strong premiere at the Venice Film Festival (and Safdie taking home the Best Director prize), never took off in the ways it was expected to. It’s a good movie and Johnson is very good, often great, in it. There are moments where he absolutely nails the simmering rage of a broken and pain-addled man who is desperately clinging to his inherent niceness while his body betrays him. The problems of the film are not in his performance, which needed a far better script and sharper dramatic arc. The Smashing Machine often feels eager to not be a traditional biopic, but in cutting out a lot of the narrative meat that Safdie thought of as cliché, we’re left in sore need of the layers and colour that would give Kerr’s story life.

The Smashing Machine benefitted from its vulnerability. It’s a film at its best when it shows the wince-inducing agony of the no-holds-barred era of MMA and the toll it takes on both body and mind. It felt like the first time in a while that we’d seen Johnson play someone who wasn’t invincible. Being unbeatable can be fun, especially in ludicrous action fare involving giant gorillas or leaps from impossibly high buildings. With Johnson, the sameness of it all started to wear thin, particularly as his need to always be on top required the narrative to become less interesting to withstand it (Jungle Cruise is a big example of this.)

If The Smashing Machine did one thing well, it’s give Johnson clout among his contemporaries and the directors who could truly give him the hefty material that’ll show his range. In a recent Esquire profile, both Darren Aronofsky and Martin Scorsese celebrated his performance as Kerr and talked about working with Johnson in the future. Scorsese has cast him in a Hawaii-set crime drama that’ll reunite him with Emily Blunt, and Aronofsky is working with him on The Breakthrough, a drama about a motivational guru with a cultish agenda. Doesn’t that sound like an amazing and extremely fitting role for Johnson?

It’d be too easy to say that Johnson’s next move should be to do more so-called serious films. Duh, of course that’s a decent strategy and one he’s already moving forward with. I always like to see blockbuster stars move into more prickly projects, and Johnson has the goods to do some really weird and unexpected work. But this is also a man who loves being number one and wants to retain that peak position. He hasn’t massively changed his ways with those big-budget tentpole flicks that used to be guaranteed hits but are now stumbling. Remember Red Notice? Or Red One? Maybe the word “red” is the problem. Much like his friend and one-time co-star Ryan Reynolds, the brand took precedence over the work, and that choice inherently has a short shelf life.

So, yes, I want to see Johnson do weirder and darker stuff, and that also includes his headliner gigs. Wouldn’t it be cool to see him in a really stylised John Wick-esque action film, or one with gnarly set-pieces and potent physical stakes like The Raid. Let him be tragic, pathetic even. Take the chance to be niche and unconcerned with pandering to an IPO. Let a director use him as a tool for their story. Crucially, don’t be so afraid of not appealing to every demographic. Frankly, I think this is what’s hindering Johnson. Before, he could rely on IP to keep things afloat, but forced to stand alone, there’s a curious timidity to his approach. You see this in his sudden proclamation that he’ll never get political again, as though he was some progressive radical in the before times. The adage is true: being for everyone means, sooner or later, you’ll be for nobody.