'The Little Mermaid' Splashes To The Top of Box Office with $95.5 Million Opening Weekend and Counting!

After months and months of anticipation, ‘The Little Mermaid’ finally debuted in theaters this weekend and now the Halle Bailey lead film has splashed to the top of the box office raking in some major bucks.

Disney’s live-action remake of its 1989 animated classic drowned all its competition by bringing in a whopping $95.5 million across 4,320 screens in North America, per studio estimates Sunday (May 28).

Disney estimates the film starring Halle Bailey as the titular mermaid Ariel and Melissa McCarthy as her sea witch nemesis Ursula will reach $117.5 million by the time the holiday is over. It ranks as the fifth biggest Memorial Day weekend opening ever.

It displaces Fast X in the top spot. The 10th installment in the Fast and Furious franchise starring Vin Diesel has lagged behind more recent releases in the series, bringing in $23 million domestically for a two-week total of $108 million for Universal Pictures.

In its fourth weekend, Disney and Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 made an estimated $20 million in North America to take third place. It’s now made $299 million domestically.

The performance of The Little Mermaid represents something of a bounce-back for Disney’s animated-to-live-action remakes, and makes it likely they will keep coming indefinitely. Poor reception and the pandemic had some recent reboots either performing poorly or skipping theatrical releases for Disney +, including Dumbo, Mulan and Pinocchio.

“It works as long as the movies deliver,” said Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst for Comscore. “It’s great for Disney to be able to go to their archive by reviving these titles that started off as huge hits in the animated realm.”

The opening puts it in the top tier of Disney’s remakes, with a similar performance to 2019′s Aladdin, though it was well short of 2017′s Beauty and the Beast, which opened to more than $170 million, and 2019′s The Lion King, which brought in more than $190 million in its first weekend.

Directed by Rob Marshall with a reported budget of $250 million before marketing, The Little Mermaid tells the story of a yearning, wayward daughter who cuts a devil’s deal to swap her fins for a pair of legs. It features the songs from Alan Menken and Howard Ashman, including “Part of Your World” and “Under the Sea,” that helped the original film spark a Disney animation renaissance in the 1990s.

Fourth place went to Universal’s The Super Mario Bros. Movie, which keeps reaching new levels in its eighth weekend. Now available to rent on VOD, it still earned $6.3 million in theaters. Its cumulative total of $559 million makes Mario and Luigi the year’s biggest earners so far.
via Billboard