With the embargo being lifted, the first reviews for Disney’s The Little Mermaid remake have broken the surface, allowing us to gauge exactly how good this reboot of the beloved 1989 tale is. Unfortunately, the answer seems to be that it’s not as good as we wished it to be, something that becomes clear once you look at the movie’s decidedly middling Rotten Tomatoes score.
While star Halle Bailey is winning acclaim across the board as Ariel, not a whole lot else about the film is, resulting in its disappointing 71 percent rating on the review-aggregate site at the time of writing. On top of being lower than six other Disney live-action remakes (and exactly deadlocked with another one), this score also means it continues a dispiriting tradition that’s plagued the Mouse House’s reimaginings.
Thanks to this, The Little Mermaid is now the latest in a long line of Disney remakes whose Rotten Tomatoes scores pale in comparison to the animated originals. Whereas many of the studio’s animated classics have ratings of 90 percent or above (I mean, that’s what makes them classics in the first place), many of the new versions have RT scores more than 20 points lower. In the case of TLM, the ’89 iteration sports a whopping 92 percent rating.
Others of this ilk include 2017’s Beauty and the Beast (71 percent) vs. the 1991 film (93 percent), 2019’s Lady and the Tramp (66 percent) vs. 1955’s original (93 percent), and 2018’s Aladdin (57 percent) vs. 1992’s Aladdin (95 percent). The widest gap between the animation and the live-action remake’s RT scores, however, has to be the Pinocchio phenomenon. While the cherished 1940 work of art sports a perfect 100 percent, the 2022 Robert Zemeckis effort has a mere 22 percent — and couldn’t even be the best adaptation of that year.
Of course, Disney has occasionally managed to produce a remake that’s reviewed even better than its predecessor — twice, in fact, in the cases of The Jungle Book and Pete’s Dragon, both in 2016 — but The Little Mermaid is one of the poor, unfortunate souls doomed not to earn that honor.
