There’s Something Fishy About ‘The Little Mermaid’ Audience Review Scores On Rotten Tomatoes

Something fishy is going on with The Little Mermaid’s Rotten Tomato user reviews. I fully expected this movie to fare better with critics than with audiences given how the culture wars normally work.

Instead, the critic score is just 67% as of this writing, while audiences are giving it a whopping 95%—significantly higher than The Jungle Book’s 86%. That film scored a 94% with critics.

This is actually quite similar to The Super Mario Bros. Movie, which scored just 59% with critics while 96% of fans reviewed the film positively on Rotten Tomatoes. But that’s reflected almost exactly over at Metacritic, where The Super Mario Bros. Movie scored just 46 with critics, but pulled in an 86 with audiences.

Meanwhile, Metacritic’s The Little Mermaid page reflects almost the complete opposite of Rotten Tomatoes:

This is much more in line with what I expected would happen with audience reviews since this movie has become so embroiled in culture war debates around race-swapping, “wokeness” and so forth, as well as just Disney fatigue and many people not invested at all in the culture wars who are tired of the live-action remakes.

I find it utterly preposterous that this film would score that much higher with audiences than with critics. Critics, while not entirely politically aligned, are much more likely as a group to be sympathetic to social justice politics and less reactionary to changes made to beloved classics than the average moviegoer. I would expect this movie to have a pretty wide spread of negative and positive reviews, and a score within shouting distance of the critic score (a bit higher or a bit lower, but not almost 3o points higher!)

Indeed, 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. 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.

Do I think Metacritic’s 2.1 is an accurate reflection of this film’s quality? Definitely not. CinemaScore has actual audience members giving this an ‘A’ grade, so it’s definitely being warmly received. Beauty and the Beast’s live-action remake also got an ‘A’ CinemaScore, but only clocked in at 80% on Rotten Tomatoes.

I know that Rotten Tomatoes is taking moderation of user reviews seriously, and tries to prevent review-bombing, but these scores seem inflated beyond what is realistically likely for a film that is getting such a lukewarm reception from critics. Peter Pan & Wendy, the most recent live-action Disney remake, scored just a bit lower than The Little Mermaid with critics (62%) but bombed completely with audiences at just 11%.

Something smells fishy to me. Even just casually observing forums and social media, you see a pretty wide range of reactions from wild praise to “meh, it was okay” to “this was hot garbage.” There is no way that Rotten Tomatoes’ 95% or Metacritic’s 2.1 are accurate reflections of what people are actually saying about this movie in the real world. Make of that what you will.

Finally, I should point out that what Rotten Tomatoes shows on its front page is ‘Verified Audience’ scores, but you can click on ‘All Audience’ and suddenly it’s a very different picture:

This seems like a more realistic reflection of what has become a very controversial film. Controversy drives negative reviews. (Note: The uncontroversial Super Mario Bros. Movie gets 95% with “All Audience” and 96% with “Verified Audience.”)

I haven’t seen it myself yet. I think it looks fine. My biggest concern with all of these live-action remakes is that they almost always lose at least some of the magic that the original animated versions had in spades. Even ones I’ve enjoyed I think to myself after, “Well, I’d prefer to just watch the original!”

And honestly: Wouldn’t you?