Media Admits: The Little Mermaid Reboot May Not Even Break Even

The background: The Little Mermaid is the latest movie to be championed by the leftwing Identity Politics activist media. Some people object to the thirty-seventh gender- or race-swap in the past five years, and so the leftwing activist media has to scream "THE LITTLE MERMAID WILL BEAT ALL OF YOU RACISTS AND THEN YOU'LL SEE! OH, YOU'LL SEE, BIGOTS!" and lie about its actual level of success.

By the way, a friend said she thought the Matloch she-boot looked okay. I didn't watch the trailer. I like Kathy Bates and think she can play a detective. (I know Matlock's allegedly a lawyer but doesn't he get people off not through lawyering, but by finding The Real Killer?) She seems smart.

And I don't think it's a huge thing to race-swap a fairy tale character. Yes, the original myth comes from Denmark, I think, but whatever.

The problem is that Hollywood's only two ideas for the past ten years have been to 1, reboot an old IP which doesn't need a reboot, and 2, build up ESG points by getting rid of the icky men and the icky white people.

And yes, we're sick of it.

The media shouted with joy that the movie made $119 million over a four day weekend. They claimed it fell "just short" of expectations, of $120 million.

Well... it fell short of the final projection. But five days before that projection, it had been expected to make $140 million. They lowered that projection just before the opening, and then the movie failed to meet that lower projection.

And it's doing horribly overseas. I think it only made $44 million overseas, for a total opening cume of $164 million. No movie that makes so little overseas is going to be a big hit.

The leftwing shill media is now preparing their leftwing readers for the possibility -- probability, really -- that The Little Mermaid will fail to turn a profit and may even lose money.

Another woke disaster, in other words.

In a rare situation for a Disney tentpole, particularly a live-action title based on a treasured classic animated musical, The Little Mermaid looks to bank more at the domestic box office ultimately than overseas, with $300M-$350M U.S./Canada to $260M abroad.

At that level, per finance sources, off a reported $250M production cost and $140M global marketing spend, The Little Mermaid could very well break-even. However, anything in the low $400M global threshold and this fish is apt to be sinking to a loss of around $20M.

"Not a huge disappointment, but a disappointment, nonetheless," one film finance insider told Deadline, given the blockbuster streak often associated with Disney.

It gets worse for Disney. Because of course it does. They're not trying to please customers or shareholders, they're trying to please "stakeholders," which means, in practice, 300 unemployed shut-ins who post extremist LGBTQ+ memes on Twitter all day long.

This will be only the first of three massive disappointments, or outright failures, for Disney, this summer alone:

The studio's summer slate remains in a precarious position after it boldly world premiered two major titles in Cannes to lackluster reviews: Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (49% Rotten Tomatoes) and Pixar's Elemental (58% Rotten, $40M projected U.S. opening).

Little Mermaid's ebb tide at the box office is extreme when juxtaposed against the high water mark seen from the last Memorial Day Disney live action feature adaptation of a toon, Aladdin, back in 2019. That Will Smith pic cleared $1.05 billion worldwide, 66% of that gross generated abroad which also counted $53.4M from China. Little Mermaid's China ticket sales were non-existent with a $2.5M start. Given the quick burn of U.S. titles in the PRC, some believe that the Rob Marshall-directed musical may not even get to a double digit final gross there.

The article notes that blockbusters usually see 60% of their money coming from overseas. This movie won't even come close to that.

They have their excuses, though: Racist foreigners in China, Korea, and Germany, who are rejecting the race-swap movie. It's nice that for once it's the foreigners the shill media is calling racist, instead of US citizens.

The other excuse is "review bombing" -- a hypothetical practice where in Alt-Right N@zis post bad reviews about a Disney movie (and it's always a Disney movie) and then Disney leans on companies like Rotten Tomatoes to start deleting negative reviews to boost the movie's audience rating.

Again, they only do this for Disney.

Rotten Tomatoes has long given Disney the power to censor user reviews. Now Disney has pressured IMDB into deleting negative reviews to protect their latest bomb.

The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) has made changes to its rating system for Disney's live-action remake of "The Little Mermaid" after the new release became the latest target for "review bombing" -- a practice in which a production is flooded with negative reviews by users who wield multiple accounts or employ bots to create new ones.

Since its release, "The Little Mermaid" has garnered 41,000 user ratings on IMDb. While the film has earned a positive 7.0 (weighted) average score, more than 39% of the ratings are 1 star, the lowest possible option.

IMDb has placed a notice on the film's ratings page, writing that the site's "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." This message has been employed before by IMDb in the cast of other atypical user score patterns.

The leftwing psychos on Twitter post hundreds of three word "i love it" reviews and 10/10 ratings for all of their identity politics movies (which they largely don't see -- they just want to "feel seen" by knowing they're "represented" in them).

They won't be deleting those Woke-Review Bombing ratings, of course.

Disney's next bomb will be Elementals, from the Pixar studio that Bob Iger bought and then turned from a critical darling and financial powerhouse into a woke bomb-factory.

Pixar's Elemental Becomes Lowest-Rated Original Movie In Studio History on Rotten Tomatoes

By Savannah Sanders Posted: May 28, 2023

Ahead of its theatrical debut, Disney and Pixar screened Elemental at the Cannes Film Festival, resulting in mixed early reviews and a record-breaking rating just like Lucasfilm's Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.

Oh, they released at Cannes, so that everyone has weeks to hear that this movie is bad.

Smart strategy, Iger!

In the wake of Elemental's debut at Cannes, Pixar's twenty-seventh film currently has a 57% critical approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

This is the lowest score for a Pixar film that's not a sequel or from an established franchise to date.

While critics noted Elemental's creativity, heart, and stunning visuals, all of which are Pixar trademarks, they also described the film as "heavy-handed" and a "misfire."

A woke Disney offering whose messaging is "heavy-handed"? What alt-right N@zi said that? That's unpossible!

You already saw in the first article that The Elementals is projected to open with $40 million in North America. For Pixar, once an absolute money-manufacturing titan, this is a dismal failure.

And Indiana Jones? Well you know what's coming there.

A "gloomy and depressing final act," says the Woke BBC, which won't even pretend it's a good movie just because it stars the British dollymop Phoebe Waller-Bridge as the film's actual hero.

Speaking of "fissures in time", Ford has been digitally de-aged to have the smoother face and thick brown hair he had in Raiders of The Lost Ark, but he gives off the uncanny-valley vibe of someone who isn't quite real. Indeed, this over-long prologue doesn't just hark back to the train set piece at the start of The Last Crusade, it's reminiscent of Spielberg's performance-capture Tintin cartoon, in that the narrow escapes are theoretically exciting, but are too obviously fake to set the pulse racing.

What's worse is that when the film jumps forward to 1969, the CGI-heavy unreality persists. Indy is now about to retire from a dispiriting teaching job in New York. There is no sign of the wife and son he had at the end of The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull -- Shia LaBeouf may not be missed, but Karen Allen certainly is -- and in general he seems to be as much of a relic as the ones he likes to unearth. But then his goddaughter, Basil's hearty archaeologist daughter, Helena (Phoebe Waller-Bridge), turns up to ask him about Archimedes' doohickey, which has been missing for decades...

Like another of Ford's so-called "legacy sequels", Star Wars: The Force Awakens, this one brings back old characters (John Rhys-Davies's Sallah has a pointless cameo), introduces new ones who are strangely similar to the old characters (Ethann Isidore plays a substandard copy of Short Round from Temple of Doom), and has the air of a film passing the torch (or whip) to the next generation. But it does all this in an even gloomier fashion than The Force Awakens did. I'm not sure how many fans want to see Indiana Jones as a broken, helpless old man who cowers in the corner while his patronising goddaughter takes the lead, but that's what we're given, and it's as bleak as it sounds.

Besides, everything is smaller and cheaper than it was in the original trilogy. Indy up against the military might of the Third Reich in 1936? We could all get behind that. But Indy up against one scientist and his silent, interchangeable henchmen in 1969? It's just not such a big deal. Mangold and his team dutifully crank out the action sequences, but it's often hard to tell what's happening or why, and there is a shortage of surprising, rip-roaring moments to make you stand up and cheer, despite the best efforts of John Williams' rousing classic theme. Take an early chase in New York, for instance. It's set during a ticker-tape parade for the three astronauts who were on the Apollo 11 moon mission, so you can imagine the high jinks that Spielberg might have cooked up: some slapstick with Buzz Aldrin, perhaps, or a giant papier-maché moon rolling down Fifth Avenue like the boulder in Raiders of The Lost Ark. But Mangold and his team do so little with the parade that you wonder why they bothered staging it.

It's the same with the scenes in which Indy is face to face with some snake-like eels, and when he finds his way into Archimedes' tomb. The jokes, the zest and the exuberance just aren't there, so instead of a joyous send-off for our beloved hero, we get a depressing reminder of how much livelier his past adventures were. Considering that the screenplay is credited to four writers -- Mangold, David Koepp and Jez and John-Henry Butterworth -- couldn't they at least have thought of something cool for Indy to do with his whip?

The movie's about a device invented by Archimedes, and sought by the N@zis, which points to "fissures in time" -- naturally-occurring time machines. You don't have to build the time machine; nature's already done that. You just have to find them and walk through.

In other words: It's the exact conceit of Mangold's earlier time-travel film, Kate & Leopold.

Here's a spoiler about the ending, according to people claiming to have seen the movie in France: Indy is broken and just wants to die. He has "nothing more to offer the world," he says. So when they go back through a "time fissure" to around 1 AD or thereabouts, he refuses to go back through the time fissure to 1969. He just wants to die in Rome (or Syria, or wherever) in 1 AD.

Phoebe-Waller bridge, the real hero, says he can't stay -- his existence in the past could screw up all time going forward.

The selfish, broken white man who really should just die to make room for his superior female replacement says he doesn't care what his existence in the past does to time, he's staying, and that's that.

But that's not that at all, because his Superior Female Replacement then knocks out Indy with a single punch and drags his tired, useless, humiliated white man ass back to the present.

Can you, like me, hear the Raiders March when you read that? Do the stirrings of adventure kindle in your heart?

Disney is killing itself and, as the kids say, I am here for that.

Shame about all that shareholder value being destroyed in a bonfire of the vanities of Bob Iger, Kevin Feige, and Kathleen Kennedy.

But then: they stopped caring about shareholder value long ago.

Re-linking the Midnight's Edge video about the replacement of shareholders as a corporation's primary and nigh-exclusive concern, with "stakeholders" -- the public generally, especially those in protected classes.

BONUS DAMAGE! This is an actual "song" in the Little Mermaid, rapped by the extremely annoying Awkwafina.

Her voice gets more obnoxious as the song goes on.

And boy, does Disney continue to amaze with its perfect, photorealistic CGI.

posted by Ace at 04:00 PM

| Access Comments