The live action Little Mermaid is at $543 million globally. Chances are good it won’t crack $600 million.
Reports put the cost of production at around $250 million. The break even point for such a budget is typically $700-750 million. So this movie is on track to lose a cool hundred million dollars, which is bad enough already.
But consider the fact that three previous live action remakes have broken the billion dollar barrier at the box office. In terms of established expectations, Little Mermaid is leaving as much as a quarter to a half a billion dollars on the table.
I blame some of this on the inherently flawed concept. Live action versions of people are obviously fine, and simulated live action versions of cuddly animals are popular. Simulated live action versions of dead-eye fish and creepy sea insects? Not as appealing.
But there’s simply no denying that the unnecessary race swapping of white ginger Ariel to yet another black actress did not go over well with non-woke foreign markets. Asian countries in particular roundly rejected this movie, which is why the international box office fell well short of domestic. This trend was completely reversed with the previous live action remakes, btw.
So yeah, don’t run your retard mouth about shit you don’t understand, whoever you were lol
Is there ANY Disney media division that hasn't burnt out already?
Live action = no
Marvel = no
Pixar = no
Star Wars = no
I'm getting ads on YouTube to sign up to Disney plus for the fucking Kardashians! If that's your selling point to pay a monthly fee then your fucked!
Disney+ has been hemorrhaging subscribers. And that’s a double whammy because they can’t even make money putting their own movies and shows on Netflix or Amazon. It all has to prop up their own shrinking streaming service. Bit of a positive feedback loop, really; if their movies and shows were good, they would drive growth of the streaming service.
And it gets more "fun" for them because they are being forced by Comcast to either sell their stakes in Hulu or buy the remaining shares of it, and it is going to cost them billions of dollars. Billions they dont have, either in liquid cash or stock value, which means they will have to sell shit.
It is absolutely insane to me how much Iger has managed to screw up. And it is Iger, because Chapek wasnt even in charge long enough to make changes to the company, and was being undercut by Iger every step of the way.
Don’t just stop at media. Merch sales are down, park attendance was at an all time low for the 4th of July weekend, and ESPN has a skeleton crew now.
I think I've seen an add on the road with grey's anatomy.
Yea, race swapping or gender swapping tells me that they don’t care and any sort of “what does it matter” argument is just pandering to social Justice weirdos.
It's beyond that.
Disney has spent literally 30 years cultivating and propagating the iconic Ariel character. It's remained unchanged that entire time and has huge brand recognition across the world.
And they torpedoed it in favour of this?
That goes far beyond pandering to their friends; I can't understand doing something like that unless they were intentionally trying to sabotage their own IP.
Also Mulan was a bad choice to adapt, Mulan is a well known story in China with something like 4 to 5 separate TV series made by Taiwan/hk/china in the last 30 years, with that comes certain cultural expectations from the audience that western studios simply can't bs their way with "let me tell you how your culture behaves". Asians in Asia simply just don't care about western movies starring Asian actors interpreting what Asian cultures are like, they have their own movie industries for that. What they want from Hollywood is huwite people doing huwite people things.
Just going to say that 543$ million globally is still insane for that garbage. I'm glad it is going to lose money but is still disappointing. Strangely enough, I don't know anyone close to have seen it but I guess large progressive cities are where the money is.
One thing I noticed when I went with the kids to see Mario, the short trailer for the Little Mermaid barely showed the little mermaid, just quick glances and with a blue filter, if you did not look closely you could not tell that it was a black actress.
I was in a small town for the 4th and there was a huge parade. I heard Little Mermaid music and my first thought was ugggggh, but then the entire float of like 15 people was all dressed up like the original Little Mermaid. It was nice to see.
Ah, that's interesting.
Me personally, I am just glad that this shit is at least on track to bomb. I was (and to an extent still am) kinda worried that this is going to succeed, especially after seeing Velma getting a second season for the same reasons TTG lasted as long as it did. I just don't think I can guarantee any successes for us in this endless mess.
There is a good chance the only reason it got a second season is because they already had it made and paid for, they just didnt release it. That is typically what happens with these sort of animated works, according to people I listen to who know the industry.
How mich of that money is just Disney buying theaters to inflate numbers with ESG money?
Remember, their goal isn't to make something you want to watch, it's to get you to nod along with what they want you to watch.
They're still "losing" money even if the movie goes past breaking even. A savings account makes money by giving you a fraction of a penny on every dollar in interest, but no one calls that a financial success because you could have invested in the S&P 500 and made 12% as annualized average return.
Finding a red head who can sing shouldn’t have been hard to do. Or you could dye the hair red.
You can't sing from the heart if you have no soul.
Plenty of great white singers with souls. I love Elvis, Sinatra, Carole King, Hank Williams Sr and Junior, Johnny Cash, Buddy Holly, Rolling Stones, the list goes on
It's just the old meme about redheads being soulless. I'm not being serious.
Ohhh. I knew you were joining but I forgot about the red head no soul joke.
I thought that came from South Park but that was before?
It was an actual old wife's tale for a long time. South Park made it into a meme.
That’s true. This obsession with not having anything that a straight guy would like is ridiculous
That I didn’t know. Thanks!
In the US, Whites and Hispanics didn't turn out for it, nor did international audiences. I'd say that's a pretty strong indicator that the black washing had an effect.
https://archive.ph/6ztm0
That chart gives me hope. White people are just not going to movies that much at all. Spider-Man 27% white, Mario 30% white - this tells me that the anti-white messaging from hollywood has reached a lot of white people and they are tuning out.
This is great. More white people realize they are in a hostile environment the better.
All they had to do was NOT put a negress as the main character.
Even an insufferable feminist IRL like Emma Watson didn't tank Beauty and the Beast. Even updating updating Jazmine for "modern audiences" didn't tank Aladdin.
Why? because they were still good looking and met the general notion of a Disney Princess.
This recent dumper trash? Not only they put a negress, it was a fucking ugly negress. To make it worse, bitch wouldn't STFU about muh oppression either.
Fuck em.
More like "Even someone who can't sing without being autotuned to shit, like Emma Watson."
The Little Mermaid is supposed to be one of the crown gems of the modern Disney Library, right next to Lion King and Aladdin, 90's superhits that any parent who grew up in the 80's and 90's was supposed to adore and want to go see again with their kids. I know my sister loved Ariel as a kid, has a few daughters herself (One with red hair too) and never even considered going to see this, just was a passive whatever response to it all. It stagnated, propped up by going all in at appealing entirely to 20-30% of the nation that hates White people with expectations of others silently filing in as called for. I'm sure beancounters in Florida expected the numbers to be massive, Covid has ended and seeing a movie about fish and sailors swimming in the ocean during summer should be a smash hit, kids are out of school and could be cycling into theaters.
Expect the next Disney Live Action movie announced to be Pocahontas, and go all in on vilifying White Man.
Disney is pedo. Which is inherently repulsive to anyone with genes that will survive.
Gender genocide is real.
Critical Drinker I think did a great breakdown of the costs involved in movies for their breakeven point. He came to a rough figure of box office has to be 3x production costs.
Most all sites report $500 mil as the point where it's profitable:
https://movieweb.com/the-little-mermaid-box-office-success/
https://www.piratesandprincesses.net/how-much-money-must-the-little-mermaid-make-to-break-even/
The only one listing $750mil is here:
https://www.thefilmik.com/disneys-the-little-mermaid-budget-revealed/
And that's not counting ESG bucks.
You get a 'D' for reading comprehension.
Your first link:
So, this article which cites another article for that entire analysis, is saying that if it makes $560M at the box office that it can break-even if it has massive post-box office success. That includes the money Disney+ will pay Disney on the books for the streaming rights (meaning that Disney owns the risk if this movie doesn't drive subscribers to their service in a way that justifies that price).
Your second link contains practically no information:
So, according to this article, $500M only covers the production costs not the $140M marketing costs that the first article cites. It's also using a standard of "success" as opposed to break-even. So, it's probably not a literal loss of a hundred million dollars as OP states but it's only flirting with breaking even which makes it a failure.
Who are they paying for this "marketing"? Themselves, since Disney is such a media giant. It is an incestuous relationship that must be broken.
I'm not here to cheerlead trash like this film, but things like this will keep getting made and we will continue with the "The walls are closing in" nonsense until we wake up.
In some cases, yes. The second article references $10M that Disney essentially paid to itself (ABC) for promotion during the Oscars alone.
Correct, which in my mind is likely a shell game to avoid taxes. Likely claimed as an expense when really it's just filtered through the beast.
It's not a shell game to avoid taxes (I'm a corporate attorney). It's a necessary, legally required business/accounting practice for entities with common ownership. Indeed, as opposed to being obfuscating, it actually provides a significant amount of clarity that benefits Disney, investors, regulators, and tax collectors.
This sounds exactly like what a corporate attorney would say to play a shell game to avoid taxes (or perhaps "pay less taxes").
This amuses me, thank you.
No offense, but you don't have any idea what you're talking about. It's an expense for the entity that produces the movie and potentially taxable revenue for ABC. I wonder what you think should happen when ABC gives commercial time to a Disney movie that it would have otherwise sold to some other company (and how that would be any more clarifying than the existing regime)?
The general rule for domestic box office is double the production budget to find the break even point. But international box office shares are different which is why the breakdown matters.
https://deadline.com/2023/05/little-mermaid-box-office-profit-loss-halle-bailey-1235383099
That's a lot of money to spend to make barely any in return...
Good breakdown.
All of this is really splitting hairs. Little mermaid is on track to make one billion fewer dollars than Lion King.