Not the Worst Mermaid in the Sea

When Disney decided to start remaking their animated films as live action spectacle, the initial results went pretty well for the company. Even discounting the earliest attempts (1994’s The Jungle Book, 1996’s 101 Dalmatians), Disney really struck gold once they committed to full remakes of their classic works. Alice in Wonderland made over $1 Bil. Maleficent collected a cool $750 Mil. Cinderella grabbed over $500 Mil. Each was made on relatively controlled budgets that meant Disney was printing money with their efforts.

Certainly they couldn’t imagine things would ever take a turn. Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin were both Billion Dollar films, and The Lion King made over $1.6 Bil. So what if some other films, like Alice Through the Looking Glass or Dumbo made substantially less? Even those still broke even, and when you factor in the Billion Dollar successes, Disney execs had to have visions of Scrooge McDuck-style vaults of money they could swim in. The salad days were here, so just keep pumping these things out and no one will ever get tired of them.

And then people got tired of them. Mulan was a straight up bomb, and Cruella (which, in fairness, came out during COVID) barely broke even, while other efforts went straight to Disney+Disney's answer in the streaming service game, Disney+ features the studio's (nearly) full back catalog, plus new movies and shows from the likes of the MCU and Star Wars. because even the House of Mouse suspected they wouldn’t make money in theaters. But the real flop was, surprisingly, The Little Mermaid, which was made on a budget of $240 Mil and made only $569.6 Mil (which, by Hollywood math, means it likely didn’t even make back its budget for the studio). One of Disney’s priced princesses flopped at the Box Office. What the hell happened?

Well, in fairness to the final product, it’s not really the fault of the film itself but, instead, a whole ton of factors that led Disney to this mess. Watching the film on its own, even after watching so many versions of The Little Mermaid (both animated and musical live!), it actually does hold up pretty well. I don’t think it’s as good as the animated version, but then I haven’t thought that about any of the live action remakes that Disney has made (at least not the ones that steadfastly retell the original story, unlike Maleficent and Cruella). On its own though, free of the pressures of comparing to the original film, it’s not a bad telling of the story. Flawed, maybe, but fun all the same.

Which, of course, means that I don’t really need to tell you about the plot, since you should know it already. Ariel (Halle Bailey) is a mermaid that longs to be on the surface, to see humans, especially after she spots Prince Eric (Jonah Hauer-King) and falls for him. Her father, King Triton (Javier Bardem), hates humans and punishes his daughter whenever she gets curious and goes topside. Seeing no help from her father, Ariel makes a bad deal with the sea witch, Ursula (Melissa McCarthy) to get legs so she can go topside, but at the cost of her voice. And if she doesn’t get Eric to fall for her and kiss her she’ll become a slave to Ursula. You know, standard fairytale stuff.

The live action version does make some minor changes here or there, like rearranging certain small events, or altering minor character motivations. Two big changes, though, do shift the narrative a bit. For starters, Ursula cheats even harder in this film than she did, originally, not only actively working to make Ariel fail but also putting a bit of a curse on her spell, forcing Ariel to forget she has to fall for Eric to win her human freedom. And then, in the final climax, Ariel is the active agent taking Ursula down, instead of having Eric do it for her. It makes things work a little differently and, in the end, it gives Ariel back her own agency, which is solid. I didn’t mind these changes.

Of course, the big change that most people (that complained online) noticed was that Ariel is black. And sure, that might seem a little weird at first, especially when her father, Triton, is Latino. But when we see her other sisters we have to note that they’re all different races, so it’s pretty clear that mermaid races don’t work the same way as human ones. Presumably either Triton got down with seven different women (which, no judgment) or mermaid skin colors are adaptable and are not unlike scale colors: depending on the mermaid, they simply look different. From that perspective it makes just as much sense for Ariel to be black as any other color.

Not that commentators online seemed to care about that. They wanted to be racist, it seems, and cause a big controversy over Disney having decided to “DEI” their hiring choice. They tried to justify it by saying that the version of the character in Hans Christian Andersen’s original story had skin “as clear and delicate as a rose leaf” (which, we have to assume, means a pink rose). But unlike with Snow White, where her name was a specific descriptor of her attributes (skin as white as snow), nothing about Ariel has to match her story.

Hell, I made the argument that Disney did a good job addressing Snow White’s name in that live action remake, so why do we really care that much about source material. It feels like a bad faith argument from people that weren’t going to see the film anyway. Who among them had even read Andersen’s original story before they decided to get racist and complain online. Probably none of them. You know, like they did with Snow White a couple of years later. It’s almost as if the film itself has nothing to do with their complaints at all…

Not that they couldn’t have legitimate complaints about the film. If I’m being honest, the songs aren’t as good here, especially “Kiss the Girl”. It’s fun in the film, as are many other songs and performances in the movie, but it lacks the magic that the Disney animators were able to give. Its presence, its ambiance, is missing something, and the film isn’t quite able to make up for that lack, especially not with all the songs they bring over from the animated film (and the Broadway adaptation as well).

Also, the film makes a curious choice to make Eric the adopted son of Queen Celina (Noma Dumezweni), instead of her natural born son. There’s a lot of talk about how he’ll inherit the kingdom some day which… how? He’s not her blood, and even with her adopting him, most kingdoms wouldn’t allow him to be in the line of succession (and if he were, he’d be way far down in the chain, past fifth cousins, step-uncles, and former roommates). Having him be the heir doesn’t make sense, and is a much weirder case of against skin-color casting than making Ariel black.

And while I think most of the actors do really well – Bailey and Hauer-King are the stand outs, and they have real, palpable chemistry – there is one really bad actor in the whole set and, weirdly, it’s Javier Bardem. Don’t get me wrong, he’s generally a fantastic actor, colorful and weird when he wants to be. He seems so reserved and uninterested in the character of King Triton, or anything going on here, that his character sucks so much soul out of the film. I don’t know what was going on with Bardem; maybe he just didn’t enjoy filming everything in front of a green screen. Whatever the case, he’s a real let down here and it nearly ruins every scene he’s in (which, because he’s a major motivating character for the story, is a lot).

So no, this remake of The Little Mermaid isn’t perfect. While it gets a lot of stuff right, it does get some things quite wrong. If people wanted to complain about the film based on its relative merits, that’s fair… although the same kinds of complaints could also be leveled against Beauty and the Beast, and that film made over a Billion at the Box Office. So clearly, all things being equal, racism seems to have caused quite an issue with this film.

Which is a pity because I think, for new kids first getting into this film, it’s not bad. It’s certainly much better than The Lion King, but it made only a third as much. It’s not the best version of this Disney story, sure, but it’s not bad, and it deserved to do better during its run. Instead it lightly flopped (like a fish on the beach) and likely Disney will eventually try to forget it even made this film at all as it finds other, newer films to remake instead.