Former Disney president Jeffrey Katzenberg might be eating humble pie, after his comments about the iconic The Little Mermaid have resurfaced in an interview with the original film’s director.
John Musker, who helmed the classic 1989 animation alongside Ron Clements, looked back on The Little Mermaid’s success in an interview with Spanish newspaper El País. Now retired from Disney, Musker spoke freely about his time at the production company, including a recount of Katzenberg’s hesitation around The Little Mermaid in the months before its release.
According to Musker — who has elsewhere directed fellow Disney staples Moana, Aladdin and Hercules — Katzenberg told the team involved in The Little Mermaid that “movies about girls don’t work.” At the time, Disney had yet to release a true box office and critical smash, and Katzenberg didn’t have the foresight around what type of story would appeal to mass audiences.
Musker also revealed in the interview that Katzenberg issued a strange directive while The Little Mermaid was being made, in response to the mammoth success of an action movie at the time. “Die Hard had been a box-office hit,” Musker recalled. “So Katzenberg came into the office saying, ‘We need The Little Mermaid to be more Die Hard.”
It’s a curious suggestion for an animated film targeted at young children, but Musker said the production note resulted in The Little Mermaid receiving a “second action sequence, with an Ursula who is as big as the building in Nakatomi Plaza.” While Musker described the former Disney head as “an emperor”, he said he still preferred Katzenberg’s leadership to that which followed, since the later inclusion of Pixar and John Lasseter meant there were “too many people to satisfy.”
Katzenberg’s comments haven’t aged well, especially considering that The Little Mermaid was successful enough to spawn a lucrative (albeit controversial) live-action remake in 2023. In the years since the animation, Disney’s catalogue now brims with the very “movies about girls” that Katzenberg thought would fail, from Beauty and the Beast to Tangled, Frozen, and Mulan.
Elsewhere in the interview, Musker shared his opinions on Disney’s increasing investment in live-action remakes, including 2023’s The Little Mermaid. The Lion King, Mulan and Pinocchio are just some of the animated originals that have been subject to live-action versions in recent years, and Musker said Disney’s risk-adverse mindset is such that they want to “just do [a successful movie] again and sell it to them in a different form.”
Musker also criticized The Little Mermaid remake for not “playing up the father-daughter story that was the heart of the movie,” adding that “live animals in a zoo have more expression” than the remake’s version of Sebastian. As for the upcoming live-action version of Moana, Musker said he has no involvement in the Dwayne Johnson-starring remake, but “hope[s] that they do it well.”
After overseeing Disney during what many believe was its golden years, Katzenberg left the company to co-found animation rival Dreamworks, finding more success with franchises like Shrek, Kung-Fu Panda, and How to Train Your Dragon.