The arguments over whether or not The Little Mermaid has enough gas in the tank to make it to a billion dollars at the box office began a long time ago, and it’s one that’ll be very interesting to keep track of.
Of course, it’s worth remembering that director Rob Marshall has experience in that department, having steered Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides past the mythical milestone over a decade ago, despite a terrible Rotten Tomatoes score of 33 percent enshrining it as one of the worst-reviewed movies ever to sail past the benchmark.
Only Michael Bay’s Transformers: Age of Extinction and Colin Trevorrow’s Jurassic World Dominion have ever crashed through a billion while faring worse among critics, but let’s hope The Little Mermaid doesn’t follow suit, because we know for a fact it’s going to end up being review-bombed.
For anyone who cares to remember, mermaids were fittingly a major plot point in Johnny Depp’s fourth outing as Jack Sparrow, something Marshall used as his inspiration to show the cast and crew of his latest aquatic escapade what he wanted to achieve, as he revealed to Entertainment Tonight.
“I wanted people to see what we had done. Obviously, it’s a different kind of mermaid, but we were all trying to figure out how visually we create the tails, even the iridescent skin, all of that. That already had our taste in terms of look and what you can achieve. We were explaining how we achieved it, too — when we were using visual effects, when we were using some kind of costumes, and things like that. We just broke it down with our entire team. That was really actually helpful.”
The Little Mermaid would bite your hand off to earn the same kind of money as On Stranger Tides, but it wouldn’t be too keen on enjoying the same kind of unenthusiastic response from critics.
