THE LITTLE MERMAID: What the Media Isn’t Telling You About the Film’s Box Office Performance.

From the moment the public learned Disney’s live-action remake of The Little Mermaid would race-swap the title character Ariel, the film has been the subject of both controversy and excessive praise. Disney’s live-action remakes have consistently adjusted the original material to appeal to current sensibilities and to make casting less white and the content more woke. Naturally, Disney purists who cherish the classic 1989 animated film and wanted a more faithful adaptation of the story were a bit perturbed. While there’s no doubt that Halle Bailey, the actress playing Ariel, is extremely talented, it was a puzzling move for a story based on a fairy tale by Danish author Hans Christian Andersen.

Still, it gave the media exactly what it wanted: a pretext to accuse right-wing viewers of racism. Disney, meanwhile, saw dollar signs as its woke audience would be clamoring to prove just how anti-racist they are and flock to the theaters to see this movie.

Well, the movie itself clearly isn’t great. Despite the race-swapping and the woke tweaks to the content, professional critics didn’t gush over the film as you would have expected. As of this writing, the film has a 67% rating from critics tracked by Rotten Tomatoes. The audience score is 95%, but those reviews appear to be filtered and may not accurately reflect the views of all those who have reviewed the movie on the site.

One audience member who saw the film and wasn’t too enthused with the finished product was the Critical Drinker. And he’s got some (unfiltered) thoughts on the myriad of things that went wrong: