I haven't seen any of these and have no idea how successful any have been lol

Just Idiocy. Broken clock something something...

Honestly, none of these remakes are good, but that one was especially not good. Everything they subtracted from the movie was not balanced out by what they added. They also really misunderstood what animal Sebastian was supposed to be… While it's true, they call him a "Crab" throughout the original film, it's clear by how they animated him that he is some kind of Hermit Crab. I understand that making him a "Fiddler Crab" in itself is a kind of pun, but it's never stated in the film, and only crab nerds would know this. This choice caused him to lose most of his expressiveness, since he would often retreat into his shell in the original film when scared. Obviously, turning him into a hyperrealistic crab also removes his expressiveness as well, but at least a Hermit Crab has that layer of expressiveness with its shell.

Melissa McCarthy as Ursula definitely didn't hit the mark either. Her performance was not dramatic or bombastic enough and the look was overall weak, they also really downplayed the light body horror stuff that made her so creepy in the original. Since they were already going to be called woke from the start, they should have just leaned mega hard into it and cast someone like Eureka O'Hara into the role, as an homage to Divine, who Ursula was modeled after.

I mean, they gave Ariel an extra song, which she SINGS after her voice is TAKEN by the contract she signed with Ursula. They added this song (along with the rap song) and cut all the parts of the movie that bring context to who Sebastian even is and why he's so musical. That lost context makes songs like Kiss the Girl and Under the Sea feel strange because, in both songs, he is literally striking up the band and getting the animals to perform music. In most musicals, the characters are not aware they are in a musical, but all of his songs are effectively Diegetic music in the original. He is the court's composer as well as a general servant of the king. It really felt like they had no idea what to do with his character after making him so realistic. They even went so far as to drop him in the ocean before the final conflict, which cut out all his contributions within those scenes.

Musically, all the recompositions of the original songs are just kind of bad. They lose something the originals had, and it's also pretty clear they had to do a lot of post work on the vocals to get them tuned right.

All in all, 5/10 it's closer to a 4 than a 6.

Absolute cherry picking. The Little Mermaid remake did better than Cruella backstory, the Dumbo remake, not to mention the straight to Disney+ stinkers like Pinocchio and Lady and the Tramp, none of which messed with race elements (I could throw the Mulan remake in there but that got FUBAR’d by COVID so I’ll give it a pass). It’s also ignoring that audiences have gotten wise to these live action remakes being soulless cash grabs and so they’re checking out.

It's an easy tactic, just call every movie woke and when one inevitably bombs, they can strut around and pretend like they knew it the whole time while ignoring all the other movies they called woke that did well. Remember how they called the Barbie movie 'woke?' Or how they called the Mario movie woke until it did well at the box office, at which point they flipped and starting calling it anti-woke.

Vibes based incoherent nonsense, all of it.

wThere is an overall contraction happening in the industry, particularly when it comes to theatrical releases. Even though there are still box office hits, people aren't going to movie theaters in the same numbers as they were, and Hollywood is flailing. The right is trying to latch onto this phenomenon by blaming woke messaging, and there are some in Hollywood who are happy to go along with that because it distracts from the real issues. A couple months ago, Bob Iger himself came out and said Disney needs to focus more on "entertainment" rather than "political messaging". This is cope, but it's cope that chuds are willing to endorse and amplify. Expect to see it happen more often as the industry continues to fail to meet expectations.

The only live action remake I've seen is Aladdin, and that was pretty bad - it felt like watching the original film at 1.5x speed on youtube - but if I'm not mistaken that film had an almost entirely POC cast and it did really well.

Does a movie have to gross a billion dollars to not be considered a failure now?

Conservatives pretend to hate Star Wars for being soy then become obsessed experts in the box office and insider Hollywood news.

I think she was a good pick for live action Ariel bc she kinda look like a fish