Disney and UK AI firm Metaphysic spent 18 months trying to build an AI digital double of Dwayne Johnson for the live-action Moana — then killed it before filming, unable to resolve who owns AI-generated likeness content. San Francisco's Industrial Light & Magic is handling the visual effects the conventional way.

Disney spent 18 months negotiating a deal to put an AI-generated face on Dwayne Johnson for its live-action Moana — and then killed the footage before it reached a camera.

The plan, per reporting by ComicBook.com and corroborated by Yahoo Entertainment, involved UK-based AI company Metaphysic superimposing Johnson's likeness onto his stunt double, Tanoai Reed, for action sequences. Johnson signed off. Disney's attorneys couldn't close it: questions over who owns AI-generated content, what security protocols govern the underlying facial data, and a stack of unresolved IP concerns kept negotiations going for a year and a half without resolution. None of the footage will appear in the final film.

The actual visual work for Moana — scheduled for theatrical release in 2026 — is being done the conventional way, by Industrial Light & Magic, headquartered at San Francisco's Presidio Letterman Digital Arts Center. ILM's named crew includes VFX supervisors Jason Snell, Nelson Sepulveda-Fauser, Alex Popescu, and Kabir Verma, with Susan Greenhow as senior VFX producer, per artofvfx.com and ILM's own project page. Bill Westenhofer serves as overall production VFX supervisor across all vendors.

Dolby Laboratories, also San Francisco-based, is handling theatrical audio and visual presentation under its standing collaboration with Disney — Dolby Atmos for sound, Dolby Vision in select cinemas — as listed in IMDb's company credits for the film and a formal partnership disclosed in a 2018 Dolby press release.

The collapsed AI deal is the more instructive story. The Metaphysic negotiations illustrate a pattern now common enough in Hollywood to be its own genre: the technology is plausible, the talent approved it, and an 18-month legal process still couldn't produce a signed contract. The sticking points — ownership of AI-generated likeness data, indemnification if the output causes harm, security around the biometric training material — aren't exotic. They're the same questions every enterprise AI contract runs into, except here the asset is a globally recognized face and the counterparty is Disney. That's not a technology problem. It's a contract problem the industry hasn't figured out yet.

ILM carrying the VFX load on a major Disney production is the default, not a surprise — the Presidio shop has worked every major franchise Disney has touched for two decades. But the AI detour clarifies the current state: the tools exist in prototype, the deal structures don't.

What's still unconfirmed: whether ILM's own pipeline for Moana incorporates AI-assisted tooling for compositing or simulation work, and whether Disney will revisit the Metaphysic approach on a future production once somebody finally writes the contract that holds. Neither company has disclosed specifics about internal VFX pipeline tooling for this film.