A lot of Moana for a ten-year period

If you really like something, there's no such thing as too much of it.

Well, I only sort of like Moana. So a third Moana movie in ten years seems like a lot, especially when Disney has other franchises you would expect them to nurture.

The original Moana came out in 2016. Hard to believe but that is ten years ago now. I liked this movie but did not love it. 3.5 stars. 

Possibly because Disney was nurturing its other franchises, it took until 2024 for Moana 2 to come out. I thought this movie was meh as hell. I barely remember what happens in it. I think there might have been coconuts and a chicken. 

Now only two years later, we're getting the de rigeur live action Moana. It's too soon, I think.

Now I should say, the ordinary "sequel every two years" rhythm of many popular franchises could give you way more than three movies within a ten-year span. In fact, depending on how popular it was, you could get as many as five. In fact, there are some series where they basically make one movie a year until the box office no longer supports that pace. I'm looking at you, Saw. 

For animated movies, though, the timeframe gets distended. Even if you determine the first movie was a hit and you want to make a second, you're starting all the way over at the beginning again, even if you've already gotten some of the technology assets lined up to easily create these characters again. We probably would have seen Moana 2 a lot earlier than eight years after Moana if you could churn out animated movies any more quickly. 

So I really think it's the close proximity of Moana 2 and the live-action Moana that seems like testing our Moana-related good will. I'm so not ready for another Moana, this soon, that I might not even see this one.

I think it seems particularly strange when you look at Disney's other franchises, particularly its most popular one.

There isn't even a live-action Frozen in the works yet. I find that odd. Granted, they're making an animated Frozen III that will be coming out next year. But that'll be eight years since Frozen II, which seems like a long time without giving us anything from this franchise. (Though it does mirror the previous gaps in this and other franchises, and is exactly the same gap as the one just discussed between Moana and Moana II.)

They are, however, making a live-action Tangled, news that I greet with both excitement and trepidation. As possibly my favorite non-Pixar Disney movie of all time, at least that's what my Flickchart says, Tangled is both the sort of thing I really want to see in live-action form, to see how they handle it, and don't want to see in live-action form, for fear of how they'll ruin it. However, it does have the benefit of being directed by Michael Gracey, who made sort of wondrous things happen in Better Man a few years ago, so maybe there's some chance for the gravity-defying elements of Tangled to really make it onto the screen here. 

But that movie doesn't even have a release year yet on IMDB. Which means it might be almost 20 years since the 2010 release of the original that they've nurtured that "franchise," if you can even call it a franchise without there ever having been an animated sequel. 

Compared to these two, indeed, three Moanas in ten years feels like a lot.

And I can feel it in my own sluggish response to the possibility of seeing the film. Even the prospect of seeing Dwayne Johnson actually play Maui, rather than just voicing him, doesn't really move the needle for me. 

I should say that almost none of the Disney live-action remakes have really done it for me. If you forced me to try to figure out which one was the most successful, I don't even know that I'd have a ready answer. Maybe Maleficent? Almost all have been various levels of disappointing. 

But at least in the case of the others, I hadn't just had my fill of them with a decade of regular exposure.