The Little Mermaid (Live-Action)

[Sotiris]

The Little Mermaid was the #7 highest-grossing film of 2023 at the global box office.


Source: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movie ... 235778767/


Incidentally, the Little Mermaid was also the #7 highest-grossing film of 2023 at the UK box office.

Top 10 films in U.K. & Ireland in 2023
(Data from Jan. 6, 2023-Jan. 4, 2024)

01. Barbie (Warner Bros): £95.5 million
02. Oppenheimer (Universal): £58.7 million
03. The Super Mario Bros. Movie (Universal): £54.8 million
04. Wonka (Warner Bros): £49.2 million – still on release
05. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (Disney): £36.7 million
06. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (Sony): £30.7 million
07. The Little Mermaid (Disney): £27.4 million
08. Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning (Part One) (Paramount): £26.6 million
09. Puss in Boots: The Last Wish (Universal): £26 million
10. Avatar: The Way of Water (Disney): £25.5 million in 2023 (£77.3 million lifetime)

Source: https://variety.com/2024/film/box-offic ... 235862546/

[Sotiris]

FYC poster.


Source: https://nextbestpicture.com/disney-fyc-gallery/

[Vlad]

Best Original Score would be fitting. But none of the new original songs are that memorable, to be honest. I'm especially surprised to see The Scuttlebutt included.

[Disney Duster]

Are they actually not campaining for Best Picture? I mean...they did it for so many others, and this isn't their worst remake!

[Sotiris]

At the world premiere in Los Angeles last year, director Rob Marshall said he had been toiling away on the movie for more than five years. They had shot (and re-shot) during the pandemic and were finally here. The movie cost more than $200 million to produce. Internally, Disney thought it could crack $1 billion worldwide. It wound up with $569 million — a far cry from the halcyon days of “Beauty and the Beast” and “The Lion King.”

Source: https://www.thewrap.com/sean-bailey-disney-legacy/

[MrXemnas1992]

Rewatched it again. Still easily one of the best of the remakes. Flawed but much better than Beauty and the Beast, Mulan, or Pinocchio.

Halle was the perfect choice for Ariel and I am so glad I was proven 100% wrong about potential miscasting.

[Sotiris]

John Musker has expressed criticism of the remake.

Companies are always like, ‘How do we reduce our risk? They like this, right? We’ll just do it again and sell it to them in a different form.’ Or they think, ‘Well, we could make it better.’ I think there was a question even with The Little Mermaid. They didn’t play up the father-daughter story, and that was the heart of the movie, in a way. And the crab — you could look at live animals in a zoo and they have more expression, like with The Lion King. That’s one of the basic things about Disney, is the appeal. That’s what animation does best.

Source: https://english.elpais.com/culture/2024 ... ncess.html

[PatchofBlue]

I think there was a question even with The Little Mermaid. They didn’t play up the father-daughter story, and that was the heart of the movie, in a way.

I think a part of that was the way that they didn't let Ariel be as snappy as she was in the animated film in order to try to placate all the parents who hated Ariel for teaching Suzie that you can get away with disobeying mom and dad. Sure, the story is still centered on Ariel breaking away from her dad, but gone are moments like "I'm sixteen years old, I'm not a child anymore!" which really speaks to that generational divide and the restlessness of late adolescence. In the remake, Ariel and Triton's tension over the humans was almost purely a matter of differing philosophies.

And I'm not saying that this is the worst way they could have played it. I find just as often, the spin-off material leans too hard into Ariel's rebelliousness in a way that she just comes off as more unlikeable than the animated film. And I think the remake was right in recognizing that at its root, Ariel's love for the above world has strong social justice elements to it that you can certainly choose to lean into. I just think that some parts of the story were neglected as a consquence.

[Sotiris]

Disney's Little Mermaid Plunges To $5 Million Loss
https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolinere ... lion-loss/

A Deep Dive Into The Little Mermaid's $360 Million Costs
https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolinere ... ion-costs/

Disney Reveals Spending On ‘Little Mermaid’ Swelled To $379.8 Million
https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolinere ... 8-million/

[D23ExpoVisitor25]

$5M loss ain’t that bad.

[PatchofBlue]

Yeah ... "plunges" is a really strong word for this scenario. 5 M is actually a small number against budgets in the ranges of hundreds of millions of dollars.

[Disney's Divinity]

Yeah, it could have been worse. But just the fact they were in the red at all is the indictment here, they should've been in the green 300-400 million with one of the Fab Four.

A few posts above, something I hadn't commented on, about Musker's criticism they didn't keep the focal point of the film on the father-daughter story... That was definitely true. I agreed with others that the love story between Eric and Ariel was better than in the animated film, but at the cost of the story that actually mattered. I suppose because they were playing very careful with everything around the Triton story because the character is quite vile in a very raw way in the grotto scene and modern Disney can't even handle "Body language~!" How were they going to let a character like that one exist without altering it a great deal to make him more sympathetic to justify his redemption later? We had to have the whole bit about Ariel's mother being killed by a human. A lot of the additions that have been tacked onto the film over the years in the Broadway show and the remake (Ursula being Triton's sister, Ariel's mother being killed by a human, etc.) have taken much more from the story than they've added.

Personally, I think Beauty and the Beast is the only one of those four films where the romance was actually the focal point. The reason those films worked so well is they were a hodgepodge of so many great things (music, romance, comedy, drama, etc.), with a heavier focus on one aspect from film to film. TLM / TLK have more drama, B&tB romance, and Aladdin comedy. It's too bad those days are mostly gone sans Frozen sequels. TBH, it almost feels pointless to have any new princess film selling itself as "the first" fill-in-the-blank princess with one film to another, since they don't really feel like a princess film without villains, strong soundtracks, romance, all the various outfits and so on like the old films.

[Disney Duster]

So The Little Mermaid was a flop after all?! While Aladdin, Maleficent, and Cinderella were hits! Wow! Well, at least like you guys said, it didn't lose a humongous amount.

[PatchofBlue]

Yeah, it could have been worse. But just the fact they were in the red at all is the indictment here, they should've been in the green 300-400 million with one of the Fab Four.

A few posts above, something I hadn't commented on, about Musker's criticism they didn't keep the focal point of the film on the father-daughter story... That was definitely true. I agreed with others that the love story between Eric and Ariel was better than in the animated film, but at the cost of the story that actually mattered. I suppose because they were playing very careful with everything around the Triton story because the character is quite vile in a very raw way in the grotto scene and modern Disney can't even handle "Body language~!" How were they going to let a character like that one exist without altering it a great deal to make him more sympathetic to justify his redemption later? We had to have the whole bit about Ariel's mother being killed by a human. A lot of the additions that have been tacked onto the film over the years in the Broadway show and the remake (Ursula being Triton's sister, Ariel's mother being killed by a human, etc.) have taken much more from the story than they've added.

Personally, I think Beauty and the Beast is the only one of those four films where the romance was actually the focal point. The reason those films worked so well is they were a hodgepodge of so many great things (music, romance, comedy, drama, etc.), with a heavier focus on one aspect from film to film. TLM / TLK have more drama, B&tB romance, and Aladdin comedy. It's too bad those days are mostly gone sans Frozen sequels. TBH, it almost feels pointless to have any new princess film selling itself as "the first" fill-in-the-blank princess with one film to another, since they don't really feel like a princess film without villains, strong soundtracks, romance, all the various outfits and so on like the old films.

Yeah, we're all kinda bummed that this movie flopped at all. Especially this of all remakes. I'm just annoyed with the clickbait-iness of the headline.

I'd even argue that BatB had the added element of Beast's redemption arc, which feels just as integral to the story as the romance. I think that's the real secret of all the Disney hits. They all had lots of things going for them, other beats to build up the love story at the center.

I myself kinda like the specific Broadway additions that carried into this remake. I don't feel like they contradicted anything from the animated film. If anything they reinforced ideas that were already there e.g. tethering Triton's hatred of humans to the personal loss of his wife feels like a natural connection. Like, these are things that could have been in the animated film but were left unspoken.

[Thumper_93]

So The Little Mermaid was a flop after all?! While Aladdin, Maleficent, and Cinderella were hits! Wow! Well, at least like you guys said, it didn't lose a humongous amount.

I never considered a hit. Some Disney fans try hard to make it look like an absolutly hit and their argument is that dolls sol well. But reality is that all the stores have much units of them yet and they are having big sales in countries where we are not so use to these kind of deals.
In Spain TLM LA dolls have more than a 70% of discount. In this country shops use to make small discounts on toys and they use to wait years till they get rid of them. But in this case you can feel that they are really desperate to sell all the dolls from this movie and from Peter Pan LA.

[Disney Duster]

Yeah a lot of fans of the original wanted this to be a hit. But this film isn't the original, it's just a remake, it's ok. I didn't know they made Peter Pan & Wendy dolls!

[UmbrellaFish]

It’s been a while since the last sighting, but another live-action Ariel product has been spotted in the wild with “Disney Princess” branding:

https://x.com/ponbonbonpon/status/1862482408626430199

EDIT: There’s more. Kudos to X.com user, ponbonbonpon, for finding these:

Disney Princess-branded Mermaid Bath Reveal toy sets featuring 1989 Ariel and 2023 Ariel: https://x.com/ponbonbonpon/status/1862592522289389643

Product image featuring complete Disney Princess line-up, plus live-action Ariel: https://x.com/ponbonbonpon/status/1862589234273517987

[Thumper_93]

This is crazy. The movie was a flop and they included the character in the franchise.
Why did they only include her? The rest of the princesses were more successful and they have never been into the franchise.
I also find it absurd to have to characters with the same name and story under the same franchise.

[carolinakid]

DEI princess, that’s why...

Like how they have both black & white Barbies.

[UmbrellaFish]

I think sometimes we Disney fans give a heightened sense of prestige to the DP franchise because we are so attached to the characters that are a part of it. But at the end of the day, its primary purpose is to sell cheap stuff to kids. Always has been its purpose, always will be. I say that, by the way, in my room surrounded by Disney Princess merch and with plans to visit one of the last remaining Disney Stores still open in the US later today.

Ariel is one of Disney’s most popular characters, and Disney has clearly identified a demand for this character in a deeper skin tone. Like carolinakid noted, Mattel has been selling Barbie in different ethnicities for decades and recently comic book movies have acclimated film audiences to the same idea. It’s a new concept to the DP franchise, but selling the same character in different ethnicities is actually a well established concept for consumers in general.

We all know the history of heroines being added and dropped from the franchise, so that could happen with 2023 Ariel, too. Perhaps this small doll line-up is a one-off experiment, although we did see a 2023 Ariel Disney Store doll earlier in the year with the same Princess branding.

Almost more interesting is the exclusion of Asha in the small doll line-up. If TLM’s budget hadn’t ballooned so much, it would have been a modest success. Wish was an out and out flop. Asha is the first prospective princess in the modern era to have her movie bomb without Covid being a factor. Her movie is just barely a year old, so maybe it’s too early to move her to the line-up. But it will be interesting to see what happens to Asha from here… What if Asha isn’t added to the franchise?