‘The Little Mermaid’ Might Actually Lose Money for Disney

A Deadline piece on “The Little Mermaid” has buried the lede: Disney might actually lose money on this one.

The gist of the issue when it comes to “The Little Mermaid” is that it’s doing well domestically, but overseas? Not so much.

The film has a reported $250M budget cost and $140M global marketing spend. “The Little Mermaid” could very well break-even, but it won’t make much of a profit.

Anything in the low $400M global threshold and this fish is apt to be sinking to a loss of around $20M.

Disney’s last live-action feature, “Aladdin”, back in 2019, did very well with a $1.05 billion worldwide gross. The problem is that Little Mermaid‘s China ticket sales are weak. That country is, supposedly, very angry that a black actress took over the role of Ariel the Mermaid

Should Little Mermaid break even, it would be a rare feat for a tentpole to do so on the back of its domestic box office.

‘Little Mermaid’ had a strong start domestically nabbing $118.8M over the 4-day Memorial Day holiday. Deadline is saying that the backlash the film has received is not exclusively just a China thing, they also cite Korea, China, France and Germany.

This weekend, ‘Little Mermaid’ will face off against another family film, “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse”, which is expected to gross $80M-$90M in U.S./Canada.

Yea, best case scenario for ‘Little Mermaid’ is that it breaks even, at least from theatrical revenues, despite a really good opening domestically.

I don’t blame the casting. I blame the high budget. $250 million is ridiculous, that’s the same reason why the $340 million costing “Fast X” might not turn out a profit as well.