Disney’s latest live-action adaptation pulled a reverse Fast X, as while it did quite well domestically, its international box office is a very different story. Still, The Little Mermaid has opened to $163.8M globally through Sunday and now stands at $117M+ over its four-day opening weekend. There’s a chance it’ll still hit $119M but that’s still slightly off from the initial expectation of it to go beyond the $121M+ range after that strong Friday opening.
The film has an A CinemaScore rating and word-of-mouth should’ve been in its favor, but there are always external factors that you might not expect to have their influence on performances. We saw it with families not showing up until the summer box office kicked off and the film still passed Aladdin’s $91.3M three-day weekend.
Disney put a big gamble into this film being a massive success with a variety of promotional tie-ins, which makes it probably their biggest for a non-tentpole IP from their subsidiaries. The issue is that its overseas performance is a bit questionable for the film’s chance of pushing to compete with Aladdin‘s long-term box office. That film went on to pass a billion but it’s uncertain with this remake.
The Little Mermaid overall had an international box office of $68.3M by Sunday, which put it at $163.8M excluding the Memorial Day Monday. The problem is the film is facing some harsh right-wing review bombings in multiple countries. IMDb’s of the United Kingdom, Mexico, and Brazil alongside AlloCiné in France have warned that their systems are seeing irregular activities.
China has also shown a rather harsh reaction to the film. Maoyan has no audience score which is very unusual. The film is likely to just pull in $4M which is not a good sign after Fast X and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 finally re-awakened some trust with Western releases in that market. So, we will have to see just how much the domestic market can hold carry the film if it was front-loaded on Friday.
