25 Years Later, Russell Crowe’s 10/10 Psychological Hit Set to Be Toppled by Disney’s Major Box Office Contender

Russell Crowe has spent much of the year shooting the Highlander reboot with Henry Cavill and filming The Last Druid in Spain, while Unabomber arrives on Netflix this month with Crowe as the Harvard professor whose experiments allegedly helped shape Ted Kaczynski. He has also signed on for the sci-fi thriller Bluefly opposite Priyanka Chopra Jonas. It is a packed slate for an actor whose theatrical drawing power has faded since his early 2000s peak, when he released Gladiator, A Beautiful Mind, and Master and Commander in a four-year run few stars could match.

Now, one of those films, A Beautiful Mind, is about to be overtaken on the all-time worldwide box office chart by a Disney remake that few people seem especially fond of. Ron Howard’s Best Picture winner about mathematician John Nash earned Crowe one of his three Oscar nominations and finished its worldwide run at about $316.8 million.

The movie about to pass it is Thomas Kail’s live-action Moana, which has reached $315.4 million globally and now sits roughly $1.4 million behind. With the remake arriving on digital this week and still adding small grosses overseas, it should clear that mark soon enough. If it does, a live-action Disney musical remake will have outgrossed one of the signature prestige dramas of its era.

By Any Normal Comparison, the Two Runs Are Not Especially Alike

A Beautiful Mind cost about $58 million and turned into a major hit, riding word of mouth and awards momentum through the winter on its way to four Oscars. Moana, by contrast, reportedly cost $250 million before marketing, opened to a soft $43 million domestically, and was projected by Deadline to lose somewhere in the range of $100 million to $125 million for Disney. The company has acknowledged that the film fell short of box office expectations, even as the company pointed to merchandise and likely Disney+ value as part of the broader picture.

In that context, passing the unadjusted worldwide total of a 25-year-old drama does not mean much on its own. The Moana live-action sits at 32% on Rotten Tomatoes, with critics repeatedly noting how little the remake changes from the 2016 animated original, though audiences were considerably friendlier and gave it an A- CinemaScore. Its underperformance has been linked to remake fatigue and to the odd decision to release it just 19 months after Moana 2 made over a billion dollars. The Rotten Tomatoes critic’s consensus reads:

“The sea calls to no one in this underwhelming new version of Moana, an endeavor that solidifies its animated predecessor as the superior adventure.”

For Crowe, though, the Moana comparison is mostly beside the point, as his legacy from that era was cemented long ago. These days, he seems more drawn to streaming-friendly thrillers like Beast and The Get Out, both of which arrived earlier in 2026. And last year, Nuremberg was a reminder that he can still anchor a serious prestige drama, even if it ultimately missed the Oscar lineup.

Moana

2
/5

Release Date

July 10, 2026

Runtime

120 Minutes

Director

Thomas Kail

Writers

Dana Ledoux Miller, Jared Bush