Lin Manuel Miranda Will Not Be Returning For 'Moana 2'

TV & Film

Mar 3

Auli’i Cravalho is coming back to the waters of Moana 2, reprising her role as the spunky title character, but she won’t be singing songs written by Lin Manuel Miranda when it opens in theaters on November 27, 2024. That honor goes to Disney’s first female songwriting duo, Abigail Barlow and Emily Bear, who are only the eleventh- and twelfth- female songwriters for Disney in 87 years of musical movie making. The alliterative pair broke the internet on TikTok with songs inspired by the Netflix series Bridgerton, which led to a full-length musical, which led to their winning a 2022 Grammy Award for their efforts.

Though the general public is just recently finding out about the new songwriters, according to Emily Bear’s post on social media, she and Barlow have been “secretly living a songwriter’s dream” as they have been writing the songs for Moana 2 for the past two years. Bear and Barlow will be joining Mark Mancina and Opetaia Foa'i who wrote the score and contributed to the original songs of the first Moana.

Since this update has been officially announced, potential audience reaction has been mixed. Some people are not happy that Disney is making a sequel instead of mining new material, and, since Bob Iger declared last month that Moana 2 will get a theatrical release instead of being a series on Disney +, some people are saying that they do not want to go see the new movie.

Upon learning that Miranda is not involved, that reaction has spread:

"For all of the hate he gets, Lin writes a mean freaking soundtrack and ESPECIALLY delivered with Moana, so this would be such a shame,"

"This is a bad thing btw (by the way) like one thing about Mr. Miranda is he can write."

"This movie is not gonna do well," were just some of the feelings expressed by folks on X (formerly Twitter).

Others are staying optimistic, saying:

"I will be watching,"

"I'm TUNED IN,"

"Omg!! I can't wait to hear the songs,"

"The first one was amazing, so,".

We will see how this plays out over our Thanksgiving turkey.

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