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The “get woke, go broke” crowd has egg on its face again, with Disney’s new live-action The Little Mermaid raking in a cool $117 million at the domestic box office and another $68 million internationally over the Memorial Day weekend. The anti-woke haters, you may recall, were outraged that a black actress, Halle Bailey, took on the titular role, and had convinced themselves that the film would be a colossal flop.
So how are the doomsayers reacting to the film’s success? Like the UFO cultists in the sociology classic When Prophecy Fails, they’ve found reasons to convince themselves that they weren’t wrong.
The China Syndrome
Though The Little Mermaid did quite well in the US, it did poorly in China, taking in less than $4 million over the weekend and giving the haters an excuse to call the successful film a flop.
It’sa me, Mario
On PJ Media, Matt Margolis sniffed that the movie hasn’t done as well as The Super Mario Bros. Movie, a massive hit that has taken in more than a billion dollars in box office so far.
Despite all the hype surrounding The Little Mermaid, and the benefit of a long weekend opening, it failed to top The Super Mario Bros. Movie’s opening weekend domestic box office of $204.6 million. Comparing apples to apples, The Little Mermaid made $95.5 million, excluding its Memorial Day take. Ouch.
Really? $95 million is an “ouch?”
So, to put it another way, The Super Mario Bros. Movie made more than double what The Little Mermaid did over the same period of time. But, the media is presenting The Little Mermaid as some box office record breaker. It’s not. Disney remains dethroned as the box office king.
Talk about moving the goalposts.
Future Shock
Our old friends at Bounding Into Comics found some guy on YouTube who crunched some numbers and somehow deduced that the film might not look like a flop now, but it will in the future.
“I would not be surprised if when all the numbers comes in it’s a $50 to $100 million loss. That’s the kind of numbers we’re seeing from this movie right now,” he shared.
Ironically, OMB Reviews then predicted this could be a first for Disney, “This could be the first time that a full-fledged, full-featured, full distribution movie from Disney, the live-action Disney remakes ends up being an actual box office flop.”
Let’s stick a pin in this one and see how these predictions fare in the long run.
Review-bombing run
The haters have also taken solace in the fact that the movie got a lot of one-star reviews on IMDb. Never mind that many of them seem to be from bots and from people who haven’t seen the film.
The truth-challenged Gateway Pundit declared in a headline that the “Woke ‘Little Mermaid’ Reboot Completely Bombs in Reviews, IMBD Blames Online Trolls, Manipulates Votes to Give Higher Audience Score!”
Well, part of that is true. IMDb says it had “detected unusual voting activity on this title”–by which they mean a review-bombing campaign–and that “to preserve the reliability of our rating system, an alternate weighting calculation has been applied.”
Right now, the IMDb rating is 7.0 out of 10; on Rotten Tomatoes, where they only poll “verified audience” members, the film has a 95% audience score.
Hideous Kinky
Some Little Mermaid haters have redirected their ire towards the New York Times, a favorite right-wing target that ran a negative review of the film complaining that the remake “reeks of obligation and noble intentions” and chastising it for missing “joy, fun, mystery, risk, flavor, kink… .”
Naturally, the haters are aghast at seeing the word “kink” in a review of a kids’ film, and have therefore concluded that the Times is full of pedophiles.
It’s become a new right-wing mantra: When in doubt, accuse someone of being a pedophile.
Anyway, in conclusion, cry moar you bunch of racist idiots.
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@ kat
Well I use FCP; and I’ve nearly started reading the manual; so I am an expert.
Which qualifies me to point out that, according to today’s movie press, it’s actually doing quite well.
https://collider.com/the-little-mermaid-global-box-office-326-million/
Seems to have picked up a 2nd week boost.
For anyone who can’t be arsed reading all that…
@Alan Robertshaw
Romance and hope? No wonder incels hate it.
@Jay pri:
I have to ask: how much attention did you ever actually pay to fairytale movies for little girls before this particular uproar arose?
<i>…with Mexico, Brazil, and the United Kingdom as the three international territories where the adaptation has reached new heights…</i>
What, you mean countries with lots of nonwhite people don’t necessarily expect all cartoon characters to be White?! Well, color me shocked!
They used these exact talking points about the Star Wars Sequel Trilogy.
@bcb
It’s gotten to the point where any film with a Black or female protagonist is going to have right wingers predicting its failure for being woke.
As a person who has done some low-level movie-making (with acquaintances who’ve done the actual big deal in L.A.), who had a subscription to Variety and the Hollywood Reporter for years…
I’ve gotta say, the movie is doing really well.
Poor widdle racist incel boy, trying to act tough and getting smacked down by facts and laughed at for his emoji use. Ask Mommy for some Hot Pocket copium.
And now the Spider-Verse sequel is raking it in, even though the main protagonists are a African American/Puerto Rican young man and a white young woman, with white men only in supporting roles.
The first Spider-verse movie was one of the most excellent things I’ve seen in the past few years. It was perfect. Probably my favorite comic book movie, because it looked like a comic book and their multi-verse makes more sense and is funnier than most.
Ryan George hitting it out of the park again.
“Any major changes?”
“None that I can foresee anyone on the internet getting mad about.”
@GSS ex-noob:
People at the time were calling the first Spider-Verse movie ‘a love letter to the medium of animation’. Each of the characters from the different universes being drawn (deliberately) in a consistently different style. Playing with transitions and overlapping dialogue as everybody tells their very similar origin stories in a way that would be next to impossible to do without the complete scene control animation gives, along with voice actors who know how to read to the scene timing. All in general creating a movie which could only have been done in animated form.
(Not to say that people haven’t tried doing animation tricks in an otherwise ‘real-life’ movie. See Scott Pilgrim for an example of a movie which deliberately played a bit loose with reality.)
@ jenora
Ooh, in the words of Mrs Merton “Let’s have a heated debate.”
I think that you probably could do such a scene live. However there are two main reasons why we don’t see that.
The first is audience expectations. The received wisdom is that, generally, audiences don’t like naturalistic dialogue; especially overlapping. The theory being that the extra processing it takes to comprehend what’s going on induces listener fatigue and takes people out of the movie.
I don’t agree with that. I think there are loads of examples of great films with realistic dialogue. Admittedly they tend not to be the big blockbuster ones; but I think that’s the down to the over caution of producers rather than the abilities of the audience.
The second is the workflow in a standard movie. It’s all shoot for coverage then pass on to the post production team. That is of course implicit in the term.
But I have seen some very compelling arguments from editors and VFX people, that films could be so much better if they were involved earlier in the process. It could be as simple as just saying to the cinematographer or DP “move the camera two inches left”; and they then have something to work with that results in a much more superior end product.
Again, some films have used that model. Dredd for instance. And I think that looks amazing. And that was a real low budget movie by Hollywood standards.
Of course if Spiderverse is a Disney movie then no doubt there’ll be a live action remake to cash-in, and we can see whether it can be done.
@Alan Robertshaw
The Spider-Verse films are an entirely Sony production, due to the complexities of the Spidey rights and their deals with Disney.
Basically: Sony retains the media rights to Spider-Man and related characters.
The Spider-Man MCU films are co-productions between Sony and Marvel Studios/Disney, and so can use the full breadth of the Spider-Man IP.
The non-Spider films are Marvel Studios/Disney productions, but are allowed to use Spider-Man and a tiny number of supporting characters (so far: May Parker and Ned).
Sony can do whatever it wants with the Spider-Man IP in non-MCU projects. This has been both
Good: Sony Animation’s Spider-Verse, and
Bad: Sony’s attempts to build a “Cinematic Spider-Man Universe” around Spider-Man’s villains with a distinct absence of Spider-Man himself with films like Venom, Morbius, and I kid you not, upcoming solo films for Black Cat and Silver Sable. Silver Sable? SILVER SABLE?!? I’ve been a fan of Spider-Man comics for 35 years, and I even I don’t care about Silver Sable.
Ooh, cheers Allandrel. I love complex IP things like that.
One of my fave IP oddities, is that the Police managed to lose the IP rights to Police Boxes; to the BBC (because most people now just think ‘TARDIS’). The police though are still allowed to use police boxes.
But speaking of unlikely IP matters. I’m putting together a video on camouflage. The history is quite interesting. Like the role of the French Impressionists in WW1.
But perhaps people aren’t aware that individual militaries retain the IP rights in their own camo patterns.
ETA: The reason a Canadian Army poster is listed in the documents is that the Canadians first came up with the idea of digital camouflage patterns, so the USMC had to demonstrate theirs was different enough that it wasn’t infringing.
Trump indicted in classified documents case
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/06/08/trump-indicted-classified-documents/
It’s a criminal indictment. O frabjous day!
Speaking of IP. I’ve just had to plough though 27 pages of SCOTUS judgment on that squeaky dog toy case just to find out they’ve remitted back to the lower court. Kagan was funny though.
It’s total bullshit from the start.
The MCU remains successful no matter how much they cry while the DCEU, much more sensitive to their needs, exploded. They need to craft conspiracy theories about paid critics to pretend otherwise.
More importantly, no matter how dishonest and cherry-picked their position is, it’s moot. What if going woke means going broke? Companies should care about the bottom line at all costs?
What they really fear is that in fact going woke doesn’t mean going broke. Because they think that if the market has chosen, it’s chosen the best. Which means if the market has actually chosen wokeness, they’re in the wrong. It doesn’t matter that the very fact that the market did means they’re wrong. What if there’s some kind of artificial market distortion? Then markets don’t mean anything. Either markets do represent what people actually want, in which case people want woke stuff, or they don’t, in which case it doesn’t mean anything.
What I’m surprised by is that apparently a Disney remake may actually be worth watching!