The latest Disney live-action/CGI remake of an animated classic, The Little Mermaid, may have had a respectable performance at the box office, but not nearly as good as the mainstream media would like you to believe.
Despite the considerable excitement 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, which earned an impressive $204.6 million during its opening weekend. To make a fair comparison, The Little Mermaid only managed to accumulate $95.5 million, excluding its Memorial Day earnings; if you include the holiday, it brought in $119 million.
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.
According to a report from Fox News, The Internet Movie Database (IMDB) activated an “alternate weighting calculation” to compensate for alleged “unusual activity” in reviews for The Little Mermaid. While many on the left claim that racists are coming out of the woodwork to pan the racial re-casting of Ariel, in actuality, the real problems with the film include the extended runtime (it’s roughly 50 minutes longer than the original), the lackluster CGI, and the bleakness of the underwater scenes, amongst other things.
Nevertheless, the IMDB page warns 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.”
A true average of the ratings gives the film a 4.6/10 from audiences, while the weighted average gives the film a 7/10 rating.
Related: Non-woke Super Mario Bros. Movie Dominates, Smashing Box Office Records
The site does not offer any explanation for how it weights the ratings, or how it concluded that the ratings were subject to unusual activity. More than 40% of the film’s ratings were one-star ratings, but those span multiple countries, undermining the theory of a single centralized campaign.
Another site that appears to have adjusted its ratings to boost The Little Mermaid is Rotten Tomatoes. Forbes contributor Erik Kain noticed anomalies in The Little Mermaid’s ratings compared to other review sites and comparable films, like the recent woke remake Peter Pan & Wendy, which had a similar score with critics as The Little Mermaid, but bombed with audiences, scoring just 11%.
“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.”
It doesn’t make sense, which is why when you check the full audience score for The Little Mermaid, it currently ranks at 56% compared to the 95% score from its “verified audience.”
So, what’s happening and why? Well, I think this is obvious. It’s what I call The Obama Effect. What we are seeing is no different from how the mainstream media went to great lengths to push the narrative that the Obama administration was successful and scandal-free—despite all evidence to the contrary. Audiences have, by default, been less enthused about the endless string of remakes and sequels plaguing Hollywood—especially when they are needlessly tweaked. But when it was revealed that Ariel would be race-swapped in the live-action remake, it created the perfect scenario for Disney, because the mainstream media would willingly spin any negative response to the film as part of the “America is racist” narrative. Review sites help this by creating the impression that the film is nearly universally liked, and that the only reason anyone would not like it is… you guessed it… racism.
Just like what we went through in the Obama years.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member