‘The Little Mermaid’ and ‘Fast X’ Are Falling Below Box Office Expectations for Opposite Reasons

Summer tentpole films can bring a windfall of money to movie theaters, but the hundreds of millions spent shooting and promoting them require them to be big hits both in the U.S. and around the world. Over the past two weeks, Universal’s “Fast X” and Disney’s “The Little Mermaid” have found success in one, but not the other.

This weekend, “The Little Mermaid” secured a successful domestic launch with a $118.6 million four-day opening, among the top five highest for Memorial Day weekend, while earning strong word of mouth from an audience driven by Black moviegoers.

But overseas, the film grossed just $68 million, less than the $86.5 million total grossed this past weekend by “Fast X.” With a $250 million budget, the film may not have the overseas legs to turn a theatrical profit, let alone reach the $1 billion mark hit by past remakes of Disney Renaissance films like “Beauty and the Beast” and “Aladdin.”

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“Fast X,” meanwhile, is legging out well internationally but took a “Black Adam”-esque domestic drop that was only slightly softened by the Memorial Day boost, with a $23 million three-day and $28.5 million four-day domestic weekend total. With $113.5 million domestic and $512.5 million worldwide, “Fast X” still has a chance at matching the $721 million global total of “F9” if it keeps legging out outside of the U.S. and China, but with a $340 million production budget, that would still likely not be enough to turn a theatrical profit.

For “Fast X,” the factors behind the film’s box office performance are pretty easy to diagnose. Its poor domestic legs can be attributed to good-but-not-great reception from the film’s hardcore fans on opening weekend, which converted to lower turnout from casual audiences that appear to be losing interest in “Fast & Furious.”

But overseas, the film’s big-screen spectacle is still very appealing, allowing for “Fast X” to post better numbers than “F9” did during the pandemic recovery period in 2021, even if it’s still short of the franchise’s peak performance with “Furious 7” in 2015.

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For “Little Mermaid,” it’s a little harder to pinpoint exactly why this remake is struggling in countries that came out for past Disney remakes. Some box office analysts have pointed to the review-bombing that has befallen the film on multiple movie sites, including IMDb, which has responded by making changes to its audience rating system.

It’s possible that such a wave of negative reviews affected word of mouth, but there may have been other things missing from “The Little Mermaid” that other Disney remakes had to make global moviegoers interested in seeing a new spin on a classic animated film.

For one, while Halle Bailey has become a big draw for American moviegoers — especially Black audiences — and has received praise from most critics regardless of how they felt about the rest of the movie, she doesn’t have the global name recognition of someone like Will Smith, who played Genie in the 2019 “Aladdin” remake,” or Emma Watson, who was just six years removed from “Harry Potter” when she played Belle in “Beauty and the Beast.”

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The 2019 “Lion King” remake didn’t have any big name actors directly onscreen, but its cutting-edge CGI first introduced by director Jon Favreau in “The Jungle Book” three years prior created the sort of big-screen spectacle that overseas audiences expect from Hollywood. “Little Mermaid” had some of those talking animals as well, but Sebastian and Flounder reimagined as a realistic crab and fish doesn’t inspire the same awe that CGI Simba or Shere Khan might.

The most likely explanation for the struggles of “Little Mermaid” is that nostalgia for the 1989 film alone was not enough to hook overseas moviegoers, be they families or general audience, without any of the extra hooks that made the different approaches past remakes took compared to their source material intriguing to a worldwide crowd. Combine that with the much better received “Fast X” — which has a well-recognized and diverse cast beloved by that franchise’s fans — and “Little Mermaid” just couldn’t compete.

Both films may still end up being profitable titles thanks to non-theatrical revenue streams, be it merchandising for “Little Mermaid” or digital rentals for “Fast X,” but needing a boost from such streams isn’t the goal studios have when they give these films such immense budgets. While the box office may be entering a period where $1 billion-plus hits become more infrequent, these two films are the latest signs that Hollywood will need to find some way to tamp down the production budgets on these tentpoles to adjust to the new post-pandemic normal.

But to reiterate what was said up top, both “Little Mermaid” and “Fast X” may be disappointments for Disney and Universal, but will be the toast of movie theaters as they are helping restore the box office to consistently higher grosses. While Memorial Day weekend grosses didn’t reach the $223 million mark set last year by a newly released “Top Gun: Maverick,” they were only 10% off that mark with $201 million grossed by all films over four days.

Similarly, domestic totals for May will be just short of last year’s $785 million total, likely finishing at around $750-$760 million. But the films released this month will help build momentum for a summer slate that will have many more high-profile releases than last year, and could help lift the season to a year-over-year increase.

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