Disney’s live-action remakes continue being one of the Mouse House’s most lucrative revenue streams – even if The Little Mermaid is in real danger of sinking at the box office in the face of racist backlash nobody’s even trying to hide anymore – which makes it easy to forget that many of the company’s animated classics are adapted from public domain stories.
As a result, anybody can make their own version of a story that’s best-known for being a Disney-branded fairytale, not that anybody really noticed when co-directors Blake Harris and Chris Bouchard released their own spin on The Little Mermaid to almost zero fanfare back in 2018, where it promptly took a thrashing by critics to end up with a 23 percent Rotten Tomatoes score.
However, Netflix did decide that it was worth a punt and swooped in to secure the distribution rights, only for the fantasy to be lost in the vast swathes of the content library. To that end, it isn’t even on that streaming service where The Little Mermaid is swimming upstream, with FlixPatrol naming it as one of the top-viewed features on ad-supported platform Freevee instead.
In this instance, the Hans Christian Andersen adaptation revolves around a girl and her reporter uncle, who discover a mermaid being kept prisoner against her will as part of a traveling circus. Devising a plot to break her free and return her to whence she came, the unlikely trio get caught up in a cross-country adventure that resolves itself in exactly the way you would expect.
Published: Jun 8, 2023 02:27 am