Disney’s The Little Mermaid Eyeing Huge Opening Weekend at the Box Office

Disney’s live-action take on The Little Mermaid is set to make some big waves at the box office over Memorial Day weekend. Many of Disney’s reimaginings that have hit theaters over the last few years have performed well, but The Little Mermaid is poised to be one of the most successful to-date. It’s also set to deliver one of the biggest domestic opening weekends of 2023.

According to Variety, The Little Mermaid is looking to earn about $100 million over its first three days, and a grand total over $120 million when you include Memorial Day. The Little Mermaid will likely be the fourth film in 2023 to open with more than $100 million at the domestic box office, following Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, The Super Mario Bros. Movie, and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3.

2019’s The Lion King holds the biggest debut for a Disney remake, with a whopping $191 million in its opening frame. 2017’s Beauty and the Beast earned $174 million in its first weekend, while the 2019 take on Aladdin earned $91 million. All three of those went on to make over a a billion dollars at the box office, so there’s reason to believe The Little Mermaid will do the same.

The Little Mermaid’s New Music

While the story of The Little Mermaid remains faithful to the beloved animated film, there are a couple of new songs in this adaptation. Alan Menken — who co-wrote the original songs with the late Alan Menken — teamed up with Hamilton and Encanto‘s Lin-Manuel Miranda to pen some new tunes. One of them, “Wild Uncharted Waters,” is all about Prince Eric, who didn’t get much in the way of music the first time around.

“We all got together and there was originally a treatment that David Magee had worked on with Rob [Marshall] and John [DeLuca]. And then when I was finally brought in to see all that, we had meetings and Lin came in and we looked at where the existing songs were going to be, and then simply plotted out the other songs,” Menken told ComicBook.com’s Jamie Jirak. “One was for Prince Eric, and this is one where he’s longing to find this girl who saved his life. But also he had this longing for the sea, a passion for the sea, and this ‘uncharted waters’ where he’s going with his life. And that became, if you look here at the score, it’s all through the score that thematic material from that song.”

The Little Mermaid is now playing in theaters.