I don’t know who had “Disney’s musical sequel Moana 2 basically reveals a Thanos at the end” on their 2024 bingo card, but it certainly wasn’t me. The tease isn’t 100% literal (in these days of endless multiverse crossovers, we do have to specify that) but it’s surprisingly close. After the big musical finale, after the obligatory happy ending, Moana 2 pulls an old MCU trick, complete with imagery that sure seems familiar from The Avengers and other MCU movies.
[Ed. note: Some Moana 2 spoilers ahead.]
Does Moana 2 have a post-credits scene?
No, there’s nothing at the very end of the credits, but Moana 2 does have a mid-credits scene that goes full MCU. After a replay of the soundtrack keystone “Beyond,” a scene plays that shifts the focus away from this film’s story to, in theory, build anticipation for a continuing franchise.
The big villain of the movie is Nalo (Tofiga Fepulea’i), the god of storms, who sunk the mystical island of Motufetū beneath the sea in an attack on the people of the Pacific Islands. Nalo isn’t seen at any point during the movie proper — his face is hinted at in storms and seen in dramatic artistic representations, but he’s never physically present, and the heroes never encounter him in person. The mid-credits scene introduces him as just a big, mad dude sitting up in the clouds, steaming about how Moana just undid his big scheme.
He’s there to confront Matangi (Awhimai Fraser, the voice of Elsa in the Māori edition of Frozen), the seemingly threatening but actually apparently helpful bat-woman who sings Moana 2’s fiery banger “Get Lost.” Nalo has figured out that Matangi helped Moana and her friends figure out how to navigate to Motufetū, and he’s furious at what he sees as a betrayal. He chains Matangi with lightning shackles, menacing her with a classic villain line: “This isn’t over… No, we’re just getting started!”
Oh, and then Tamatoa the crab shows up.
The Jemaine Clement-voiced crab, who sings the David Bowie-inflected number “Shiny” in the original Moana, isn’t shiny anymore. His shell, previously covered in gold and jewels, is now covered with barnacles and bones. He tries to sell Nalo on his new song, “Funky Crab Legs,” a goofy little a cappella ditty about having 10 legs. Nalo is too annoyed for singing, and he casually tosses a blast of lightning at Tamatoa, destroying his new goth coating and making him pull back into his shell.
Tamatoa’s presence is mostly a brief gag, but it does serve one purpose — establishing the scale of Matangi and Nalo in this scene. Tamatoa is a gigantic monster on a human scale, easily capable of devouring Maui or Moana in a single bite. But he’s just the size of a small crab compared to Nalo and Matangi. (Incidentally, Tamatoa is canonically a coconut crab, and those things are huge on the invertebrate scale — but up against these two supernatural figures, he looks more like a fiddler crab or something equally tiny.)
Will there be a Moana 3?
Moana 2 famously started out as a Disney Plus TV series that was eventually pivoted into a theatrical release, and to some degree, that shows in the plotting: The movie introduces a lot of quirky new characters who are meant to drive different kinds of comedy and different kinds of plots, including crankly, elderly farm master Kele (David Fane), hyperactive young engineer Loto (Rose Matafeo), myth-obsessed lorekeeper Moni (Hualālai Chung), and Moana’s demanding little sister Simea (Khaleesi Lambert-Tsuda).
Writers Jared Bush and Dana Ledoux Miller try to give each of these new characters a purpose in the story and a moment to shine, but they’re still pretty superfluous to the action most of the time. They feel like a setup for a series that’s still waiting to happen.
Similarly, Nalo never actually showing up in person during the main action of Moana 2, while promising he’s about to get serious — that suggests either a direct sequel, or like Disney is still planning an episodic TV series, where Nalo could turn up with a new plot against Moana and her newfound Pacific Islander coalition every week. His motives as described in Moana 2 are pretty threadbare and basic: “Humans are too powerful, I’m jealous, and I’m going to use my storm powers to split them up,” much as in Plato’s Symposium or Stephen Trask’s musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch. A series or sequel would have a lot of room to make him more of a character and expand on what he wants and why.
But given that Moana 2 was already breaking box-office records before its release, it seems likely that Disney would at least consider another Moana movie before a Moana TV series, especially if that early box-office surge bears out. Either way, Moana 2’s mid-credits scene obviously and openly teases more Moana adventures to come in some form.
And in that way, the mid-credits scene feels like a standard-issue MCU tease, a “get ready for the next movie” promise designed to leave the audience hanging. Nalo spending the entire movie off screen and then showing up at the end — specifically sitting on a throne, in an abstract godly realm — feels so much like the various Thanos credits-scene teasers, starting with The Avengers, where he similarly calls a recalcitrant minion on the carpet for failing him, and leading up to Avengers: Age of Ultron, where he gets his big purple butt off his throne and promises to take matters into his own hands.
While we’re waiting for Nalo to follow suit in a new Moana movie or TV show, though, we can anticipate Disney’s live-action remake of Moana, currently filming in Hawaii and scheduled to hit theaters on July 10, 2026.
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