Moana 2’s post-credits scene basically brings in Thanos
I don’t know who had the Disney musical sequel Moana 2 actually reveals a Thanos at the end” on their 2024 bingo card, but it certainly wasn’t me. The plague isn’t 100% literal (in this age of endless multiverse crossovers, we should specify), but it’s surprisingly close. After the grand musical finale, after the obligatory happy ending, Moana 2 pulls off an old MCU trick, complete with visuals that certainly look familiar The Avengers and other MCU films.
(Ed. remark: 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 has a mid-credits scene that is completely MCU. After a repeat of the soundtrack keystone “Beyond,” a scene plays that shifts the focus of this film’s story to, in theory, build anticipation for an ongoing franchise.
The film’s big villain is Nalo (Tofiga Fepulea’i), the god of storms, who sank the mystical island of Motufetū into the sea during an attack on the population of the Pacific Islands. Nalo is not seen at any point in the actual film – his face is referenced during storms and seen in dramatic artistic representations, but he is never physically present and the heroes never meet him in person. The mid-credits scene introduces him as a big, crazy guy sitting up in the clouds and steaming about how Moana just undid his big plan.
He’s there to meet Matangi (Awhimai Fraser, the voice of Elsa in the Māori edition of Frozen), the seemingly threatening but actually seemingly helpful bat woman who sings Moana 2‘s fiery banger ‘Get Lost’. Nalo has learned that Matangi helped Moana and her friends figure out how to navigate to Motufetū, and he is furious at what he sees as a betrayal. He chains Matangi in lightning cuffs and threatens her with a classic villain line: “This isn’t over yet… No, we’re just getting started!”
Oh, and then Tamatoa the crab appears.
The Jemaine Clement-voiced crab, singing the David Bowie-inflected song “Shiny” in the original Moanano longer shines. Its shell, previously covered in gold and jewels, is now covered in barnacles and bones. He’s trying to sell Nalo with his new song “Funky Crab Legs,” a goofy a cappella tune about having 10 legs. Nalo is too irritated to sing, and he casually throws a bolt of lightning at Tamatoa, destroying his new gothic coating and causing him to retreat into his shell.
Tamatoa’s presence is mostly a short gag, but it does serve one purpose: establishing the scale of Matangi and Nalo in this scene. Tamatoa is a gigantic human-scale monster, easily capable of devouring Maui or Moana in one bite. But he is the size of a small crab compared to Nalo and Matangi. (By the way, Tamatoa is canonically a coconut crab, and those things are huge on the scale of invertebrates – but compared to these two supernatural figures he is more like a fiddler crab or something equally small.)
Moana 2 famous started as a Disney Plus TV series that was eventually turned into a theatrical release, and to some extent it shows in the plot: the film introduces a lot of quirky new characters meant to drive different types of comedy and different types of plots, including the cranky, older farm master Kele (David Fane), hyperactive young engineer Loto (Rose Matafeo), myth-obsessed lorekeeper Moni (Hualālai Chung), and Moana’s demanding 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 mostly quite redundant to the action. They feel like a setup for a series that’s still waiting.
Likewise, Nalo never shows up in person during the main action of Moana 2while promising that he’s about to get serious – that suggests a direct sequel, or as Disney is still planning an episodic TV series, where Nalo could come up with a new plot against Moana and her new Pacific Islander coalition every week come. His motives as described in Moana 2 are pretty worn and basic: “People are too powerful, I’m jealous, and I’m going to use my storm powers to split them up,” just as in Platos Symposium or The musical by Stephen Trask Hedwig and the Evil 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 considering that Moana 2 was broke box office records even before its releaseit seems likely that Disney would at least consider another one Moana movie before a Moana TV series, especially if that early box office surge confirms. Anyway, Moana 2The mid-credits scene clearly and openly teases that there will be more Moana adventures to come in one form or another.
And in that way, the mid-credits scene feels like a standard MCU tease, a “get ready for the next movie” promise designed to leave the audience hanging. Nalo spends the entire film off-screen and then appears at the end – specifically sitting on a throne, in an abstract divine realm – feeling so much like the various teasers of the Thanos credit scenes, starting with The Avengerswhere he similarly calls out a recalcitrant minion on the carpet for abandoning himand in the run-up to Avengers: Age of Ultronwhere he takes his big purple ass off his throne and promises to take matters into his own hands.
While we wait for Nalo to follow suit in a new Moana movie or TV show, we can anticipate Disney’s live-action remake of Moanacurrently filming in Hawaii and is expected to hit theaters on July 10, 2026.