While Disney deservedly takes the majority of the flak for repurposing classic fairytales as live-action movies, the trend was industry-wide in the early 2010s before the Mouse House cornered the market for itself, with The Little Mermaid the latest to roll off the production line this coming Friday.
Snow White and the Hunstman did manage to get a sequel – although it flopped horrendously – while a similar fate befell Jack the Giant Slayer, and to call Tarsem Singh’s Mirror Mirror forgettable would be an understatement. Based on what happened to Peter Pan & Wendy, it’s fair to assume The Little Mermaid will also be review-bombed into oblivion, but no matter what the trolls say it’ll never be worse than 2011’s disgracefully dire Beastly.
Trashed by critics and lambasted by fans of the source material – whether we’re talking Disney’s animated classic or the original story first published in 1740 – the woefully miscast Alex Pettyfer and Vanessa Hudgens give equally diabolical performances in a turgid modern-day retelling of Beauty and the Beast that finds a cocky student cursed by a witch to transform into a hideous beast, and the only way to find salvation is by discovering love for who he is on the inside.
Make absolutely no mistake about it; Beastly sucks, and it sucks hard. So if you stumble upon anyone lambasting The Little Mermaid as the worst live-action adaptation of a beloved fable there’s ever been, all you have to do is point them in the right direction and make them waste 86 minutes of their life, even though it’ll feel like an eternity.
