The Little Mermaid is the latest big-budget film to be hit with a negative review campaign, forcing IMDb to make adjustments to the film’s user rating. The multi-talented Halle Bailey headlines The Little Mermaid, Disney’s latest foray into adapting classic animated family films into extravagant hybrid blockbusters. It follows in the footsteps of The Lion King, Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast, and more. There was an initial backlash to casting a Black actor to play the mermaid Ariel, and now it appears some of those same fans have decided to target The Little Mermaid’s user ratings, forcing the online database site IMDb to step in.
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The homepage for The Little Mermaid‘s ratings on IMDb has a message indicating there is “unusual activity.” The statement reads, “Our rating mechanism has detected unusual voting activity on this title. To preserve the reliability of our rating system, an alternate weighting calculation has been applied.” The current IMDb rating for The Little Mermaid is 7.0 out of 10 stars, with 43,000 user ratings at the time of this article.
ComicBook.com’s Jenna Anderson reviewed The Little Mermaid, calling it “Disney’s most radiant and romantic live-action retelling in years.” “The Little Mermaid not only holds the 1989 original in high regard, but it captures the epic and soul-healing nature of fairy tales for a new generation, delivering a satisfying blockbuster with enough heart and romance to vastly outweigh any of its shortcomings,” Anderson said.
The Little Mermaid Becomes Disney’s Biggest Live-Action Opening
Disney’s efforts to revitalize The Little Mermaid for live-action appear to have paid off, with the film reportedly making $30 million on Saturday over the Memorial Day weekend. The newest Walt Disney Pictures remake was projected to make $97 – $98 million over three days, while four-day projections estimated $121 – $123 million. According to the reports, that puts The Little Mermaid in the same territory as Aladdin, another successful live-action remake from Disney.
According to the report, Disney gave The Little Mermaid the largest global promotional partnerships for marketing a film outside of the Star Wars or Marvel franchises. Those campaigns included Mattel, Mcdonald’s, ULTA, Kellogg’s, Booking.com, and more.
ComicBook.com spoke with Marshall ahead of the film’s release, and the director explained how much of this new The Little Mermaid works because of star Halle Bailey.
“Well, you know, she was like a sponge,” said Marshall. “I mean, you know, she’d never done this before. And she shared with me later, which I wasn’t aware of, that she was so scared every day. But I never felt that from her. She seemed as cool as a cucumber, but she was soaking everything in and everything that I would say or [producer[ John DeLuca would say. She absorbed so quickly and would just do it, but she did it with taste.”
“You know, that was that’s what’s interesting. She understood camera and film immediately, and I thought that was sort of natural,” Marshall added. “You could see she’s natural on camera, truthful. But there’s something, you know, they say the camera loves you or, you know… the camera loves Halle. They it’s just there’s something about her. And so I was so excited to actually watch her grow into a film star as we were working. It was really exciting.”
The Little Mermaid is now in theaters nationwide.
