Even though Hans Christian Andersen’s fairytale has been adapted and repurposed countless times over since first being published in 1845, almost every single person on the planet will immediately think of Disney when The Little Mermaid comes to mind.
That’s understandable when the the 1989 animated classic has been a touchstone of popular culture for over three decades, with Halle Bailey set to headline a blockbuster live-action remake from Mouse House veteran Rob Marshall next summer. However, the 2018 version that few people even knew existed, and even less people cared about, has been making an unlikely splash on streaming.
As per FlixPatrol, the widely-panned retelling of the classic story has become a major success story on Prime Video this week, after reaching the Top 10 in 10 different countries. That’s not a bad return for an instantly-forgotten fable that earned less than $3 million at the box office, didn’t score any higher than 23 percent with either critics or users on Rotten Tomatoes, before being picked up for distribution and buried by the Netflix algorithm after being added to the library in 2018.
This time, the story follows a girl and her uncle (a reporter played by The Chronicles of Narnia alum William Moseley) who stumble upon a mermaid imprisoned in a traveling circus. Naturally, they concoct a scheme to break the mythical creature free from captivity, with complications naturally ensuing at virtually every turn before the inevitable happy ending.
It was a bold experiment to even try and muscle in on Disney’s turf, but it didn’t work out too well for Chris Bouchard’s The Little Mermaid.