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In more "get woke, go broke?" news, the entertaining if incredible rumours circulating about Disney.
Disney, like all the other companies with streaming services, is facing the sharp decline since the days of the pandemic and having many subscribers cancel so they are losing revenue. It's not necessarily "get woke go broke" at work here, but Disney have been shooting themselves in the foot with the forced diversity remakes and mishandling the Star Wars franchise which should have been a reliable cash cow. Meanwhile, Universal Studios is coining it with the Super Mario movie and theme parks rides.
They're also, apparently, in a bind with Comcast, their co-owners of Hulu, who are gearing up to demand Disney buy them out. Comcast is valuing it at around $70 billion, Disney values it way lower (around $20 billion by one report).
The Little Mermaid is not earning the overseas profits it needed to do, and seemingly on the second domestic weekend it also fell back (this is being blamed on the usual "racist backlash" but oh dear those racist East Asians who aren't going to see it, tsk tsk!). The fifth Indiana Jones movie is being re-cut, re-shot, scrapbooked and everything including the kitchen sink thrown at it because of the bad reception at Cannes and the vital need for it to make at least a billion when finally released.
Now the rumours begin:
(1) Disney only has $200 million in liquidity. Comcast is looking for way more, so they're looking at more layoffs, cancellation of projects, and even selling off IP and - rumoured - some of the parks?
(2) George Lucas rumoured to want to buy back Lucas Films?
It is all rumour and insider gossip at the moment and who knows how much is true at all, if any of it, but it's fun to watch in the context of Disney's fight with DeSantis and all the progressive chatter online about how DeathSantis is an idiot for taking on a company with such high-class expensive lawyers and deep pockets to fight court cases.
Looks like those pockets may not be so deep after all!
I propose a simpler explanation for the underperformance of The Little Mermaid: It's a live action remake of a beloved animated show. Consider Dragonball Evolution, or The Last Airbender, or the Cowboy Bebop TV series, or Aladdin. I could do this all day! Has taking a beloved animated property and turning it into a live action remake ever worked? At some point you would think studios would learn this is Shit Nobody Wants, and yet...
Well this was the next in the line of huge-budget remakes of their mega classics on the level of these, which had actually been insanely successful for disney (including Aladdin's 1 billion which I'm surprised you describe as not working):
(2014) Maleficent - $750M, budget $180M
(2016) The Jungle Book - $970M, budget $175M
(2017) Beauty and the Beast - $1.26B, budget $160M
(2019) Dumbo - $350M, budget $170M
(2019) Aladdin - $1.05B, budget $183M
(2019) The Lion King - $1.66B, budget $260M
There are also some smaller ones, and a maleficent sequel, but The Little Mermaid was expected to be on the Aladdin/Lion King/BatB level.
So it was definitely expected to be doing far better, and not at all the case that 'nobody wants' these. One argument is that peoples' appetite for these remakes has finally dried up, and that this movie's box office is paying for the lion king's sins of being weird looking. And that this was the first of these without major star power. But the negative/international feedback does seem to heavily center on the race-swap ('she doesn't look like ariel from my childhood') and on the creepy realistic animal friends.
No, Aladdin made back the money, which is what they were expecting The Little Mermaid to do as well, but it hasn't done it overseas (yet) and it doesn't seem to be doing it domestically either.
We'll have to wait until all the money - including tie-in merchandise and the rest of it - is counted, but it's not doing as well as they had hoped. Even Forbes, with its "virulent racist campaign!" messaging, is aware of the performance it needs to turn in to be that blockbuster hit.
There's also Peter Pan & Wendy, another live-action remake, if it can be called a remake, which goes way further - the Lost Boys are now girls as well as boys but still called the Lost Boys not the Lost Children so shut up! Released on Disney+ instead of getting a theatrical release, on Rotten Tomatoes the critics give it 62% but the audience 11%.
Speaking of Rotten Tomatoes reviews, for The Little Mermaid, you can see "verified" or "all" reviews:
All Critics - 67%
Top Critics - 50%
I don't know what the difference is with a Top Critic, but you can see that they like it much less.
Audience opinion?
Verified Audience - 94%
All Audience - 57%
So if you just look at the ratings as Rotten Tomatoes presents them, you'll think "oh, it's a hit, audiences love it!" with 94% but that's not the whole story. Amazon did much the same for Rings of Power, getting IMDb to hide or ignore reviews that were less than 3 stars and shutting down reviews on Prime altogether.
The point is that Disney needs big hits because of the financial situation right now, so if it doesn't make Aladdin-type money then it's a flop for all intents and purposes, even if it makes a profit.
Oh yeah I think it's certainly going to end up being considered a massive flop, likely losing them upwards of a hundred million+. I put those production budget figures in for comparison's sake between the various movies, but making $450M on a $250M production budget would be a catastrophic loss, not a profit. Because there's also a huge marketing budget on top of that, and the box office revenue gets cut down by ~50% for the studio's share (the theaters get the other half).
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I was going to complain that you omitted Mulan, but then I realized I'd forgotten about Dumbo ... and apparently also Lady and the Tramp, and Pinocchio, and Cinderella, and Christopher Robin (though this one seems to be a new take more than a remake?), and Alice in Wonderland, and Peter Pan ...
Is the "insanely successful for disney" list just selection bias?
Is it that bad this time around? They didn't keep all the animal friends in other movies (reviewers talked about how awful it was to replace Mulan's honor and cleverness with midichlorians or whatever, but my kids just didn't care to see it because they wanted Mushu), but the new Aladdin had its parrot and tiger and a slightly-homunculus-vibed CGI Abu and it still made a billion dollars.
Here was the list I was using, pulling the comparable big-budget entries (although missed Alice in Wonderland from 2010 which I guess actually was the success that caused them to lean into this approach).
Mulan is a weird one that just can't be compared box-office-wise, because it was scheduled for March 2020 and went through a number of postponements until the theatrical release was simply scrapped and it was dumped on streaming.
The point is that for many people who haven't been paying as much attention, one might think that TLM is comparable to Cowboy Bebop or Dragonball and maybe people just don't like these. But we're a decade into this being one major pillar of disney's huge blockbuster release strategy (right up there with marvel & star wars) which had led to their box office domination high-point by 2019. The whole 'Walt Disney Pictures' division basically transformed into just making these, and up until the pandemic I don't think it could be described as anything other than an insane success. So now if it's starting to falter like star wars, marvel, pixar, and walt disney animation all are, that's definitely a possible culture-war hot spot.
https://web.archive.org/web/20170322204733/http://deadline.com/2017/03/beauty-and-the-beast-sean-bailey-disney-emma-watson-1202047710/
Personally I think the only one of any of these I've seen is the Jungle Book, just because it was that strange situation where two different studios put out new jungle book adaptations at the same time.
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I haven't watched either remake, but IIRC Iago and Abu in the original Aladdin weren't as heavily stylized as Sebastian and Flounder in the original The Little Mermaid, and so a semi-realistic CGI version of them wouldn't be too jarring. On the other hand, the Sebastian in the live-action remake looked like a real crab with somewhat expressive eyes.
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cinderella made $542 million, alice in wonderland made over a billion. were those considered unsuccessful?
lady and the tramp and pinocchio were disney+ exclusives. disney+ has kind of been a flop, so fair enough there.
the christopher robin movie was one of those 'kid character turns into jaded adult' movies like hook.
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Mulan was a big flop, taking in $70 million on a $200 million budget.
There was no race swapping, but most people I know were turned off by the titular character gaining magical powers on top of being a girlboss.
Mulan was also the released at the height of the COVID pandemic, which probably had a larger impact on its revenue than the contents.
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I am not sure I count the Lion King, given its CGI, but you're correct that the outcomes are much more mixed than I thought they were.
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Can I point that all those remakes were not that good and maybe little mermaid is just chickens coming home to roost. If a horse dies while running it still has some inertia behind it to move forward while beating it.
Maleficent was original film. Beauty and the beast was mostly cashing on Emma Watson post HP, Aladdin had Will Smith, the lion king had - was Mufasa's death really that sad as I remember it (yes it was).
What is the point in watching the new little mermaid instead of the old one. That is the question that all of those remakes find really hard to answer since they are at best slightly inferior in any way.
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