While the live-action/CGI remake might be putting up some respectable earnings at the box office, it appears as though the film is nowhere near as good as the mainstream 'movie review' sites would have you believe.
Despite the significant anticipation surrounding The Little Mermaid and the advantage of a long weekend release, it fell short of surpassing the domestic box office record set by The Super Mario Bros Movie. The latter earned an impressive $204.6 million during its opening weekend. In comparison, The Little Mermaid managed to accumulate $95.5 million, excluding its Memorial Day earnings. When factoring in the holiday, the film brought in a total of $119 million, PJ Media noted.
"But it’s not just the media trying to tip the scales for The Little Mermaid, which features a race-swapped Ariel and several tweaks to appease today’s woke standards. Review sites also seem to be providing cover for the Disney flick," the report continued.
For example, Fox News reported that The Internet Movie Database (IMDB) activated an “alternate weighting calculation” to compensate for alleged “unusual activity” in reviews for The Little Mermaid. While some individuals on the left argue that opposition to the racial re-casting of Ariel is driven by racism, the actual criticisms of the film go beyond that. The concerns raised include the extended runtime, which is roughly 50 minutes longer than the original, the underwhelming CGI, and the somber atmosphere of the underwater scenes, among other issues. It is important to recognize that the critique of the film encompasses a range of factors, extending beyond the racial re-casting.
And, frankly, there probably are some who are offended by the racial re-casting, believing that instead of remaking the original using a black Ariel, Disney could have just made an original film featuring a black heroine. In other words, Disney made the film about race, not the critics.
Meanwhile, the IMDB page informs visitors, “Our 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.”
The weighted average gives the film 7/10 after the original rating average was 4.6/10.
The website in question has not provided any information regarding the methodology used to determine the weighting of ratings or how it arrived at the conclusion that the ratings were influenced by unusual activity. It is worth noting that over 40 percent of the film's ratings received a one-star rating, and these ratings were submitted from various countries, which raises doubts about the existence of a single coordinated campaign. The lack of transparency regarding the rating system and the diverse origins of the ratings contribute to questioning the theory of a centralized effort, PJ Media noted further.
According to Forbes contributor Erik Kain, there are apparent discrepancies in the ratings of The Little Mermaid on Rotten Tomatoes compared to other review sites and similar films. Kain observed that a recent woke remake, Peter Pan & Wendy, received a similar score from critics as The Little Mermaid but had a significantly lower audience score of just 11 percent.
In the Peter Pan remake, some of the "Lost Boys" were actually black girls; and Tinker Bell was also cast as a black star.
“The live-action remake of The Little Mermaid is now scoring much higher with audiences than the 1989 animated classic, which sits at 88% with audiences and 92% with critics,” said Kain. “Are we to believe that moviegoers love the remake even more than the original? That certainly wasn’t the case with Beauty and the Beast, which fared better with critics and audiences as a cartoon by a wide margin.”
Nothing the left produces is real. Everything is a mirage.
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