Disney has so many live-action remakes of their animated classics that sometimes they just dump them on their streamer. That ain’t happening with their redo of The Little Mermaid, the 1989 favorite that helped save the company’s feature-length animation department after a string of underperformers and outright bombs. In fact, it has a pretty plum release date. But what is it?
The Little Mermaid is set to arrive on May 26 of next year, nabbing the coveted Memorial Day Weekend slot and arriving the weekend after Fast X hits multiplexes. It’s the next Disney live-action remake on the docket, to be followed by Peter Pan & Wendy, due elsewhere in 2023, and the Lion King sequel Mufasa, in 2024. Then there’s that Hercules remake, which original film voice talent Danny DeVito thinks should feature him.
The teaser for The Little Mermaid dropped during the D23 expo last weekend, and it reduced its star, Halle Bailey, to tears. It also drove her not-quite-namesake Halle Berry to once again joke about the innocent confusion the casting has caused.
The 1989 original helped reinvigorate Disney’s feature-length animated films, which had struggled for a voice ever since the death of co-founder Walt Disney in 1966, in the midst of making the original The Jungle Book. Alan Menken and the late Howard Ashman wrote the memorable songs and helped create a template that essentially turned Disney feature length cartoons into full-blown musicals, leading to a run of hits, including Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and The Lion King.
The Little Mermaid 2.0 hits theaters on May 26, 2023. You can watch the teaser in the video above.
