Every time Disney unveils a new clip from The Little Mermaid, it somehow looks worse than the one before. It’s as if the live-action remake is some kind of diamond of decrepitude, constantly revealing new facets of its ugliness. After releasing a clip of Kiss the Girl that was so dim it appeared to have been lit by a single flickering match a mile from the set, Disney dropped a contrasting clip of standout number, Under the Sea, that showed just how lifeless the movie still looks when the brightness is cranked up. These are iconic songs, and there’s such a stark contrast between how wonderfully timeless the music is and how artlessly the film has been shot and choreographed.
Still, I see a lot of online commenters expecting the movie to make a billion dollars. That isn’t an unreasonable expectation. The Lion King cleared that mark. So did Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast, and Alice in Wonderland. Wth $966.6 million worldwide, The Jungle Book came very close, too. These movies have a good track record at the box office, though they're largely unproven in a post-COVID world. Mulan (which was released at the height of the pandemic) lost money. Cruella (which entered theaters around the same time vaccines were entering arms) made back its budget, but not much more. The other live-action remakes of the pandemic era, Pinnochio and Peter Pan & Wendy, have been shunted to Disney+. The Little Mermaid is the first of these movies to get a theatrical release since the box office has come back to life with the success of Top Gun: Maverick, Avatar: The Way of Water, and The Super Mario Bros. Movie.
But, the tides seem to be turning for Disney. Though the company can still produce hits, like Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, the flops are getting more frequent. With Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, Strange World, and Lightyear, the House of Mouse has taken some major losses at the box office in the past year. Two of its successful movies, Thor: Love and Thunder and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, grossed significantly less than their predecessors. Some of this is just the superhero trend finally waning (as evidenced by the box office performance of Black Adam and Shazam!: Fury of the Gods at rival DC), but Disney does seem to be struggling more than we've seen in over a decade.
So, no, I don't think The Little Mermaid making a billion dollars is a sure thing. These movies being as successful as they have been has always been puzzling to me because no one seems to actually like them all that much. Obviously some people like them, or else they wouldn't make a billion dollars, and I don't want to make the mistake that Avatar haters made by assuming The Way of Water wouldn't be successful because they weren't personally excited for it. But I like the original animated movies. My friends, who are also Millennials and grew up with the animated movies, like them too. But whenever I talk to those friends, they seem generally uninterested in seeing any of these. "It just seems unnecessary," is a common refrain.
Curiosity must win out for some of them, though, because box office numbers show that people go to see them in huge numbers. But we don't have to give Disney an excuse to keep pumping out these shoddily made movies. You don't need to go see a movie just because it's big, expensive, and based on IP you like. You can give your money to anything else. If you want to see a blockbuster, Guardians 3 will still be playing. Any successThe Little Mermaid finds is another signal to Disney that it doesn't need to try, and people will still throw a billion dollars its way. Halle Bailey, Melissa McCarthy, and Javier Bardem are all compelling presences. They deserve a better movie, and so do we.