There’s Something Fishy About ‘The Little Mermaid’ Audience Review Scores — Update — The Critics Must Be Crazy

Updated 5/29/23 with a review below. Turns out I actually really liked this movie! Second update 5/31/23.

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. Many people not invested at all in the culture wars are nevertheless 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 30 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%.

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.”)

Similarly, if you click over to Top Critics rather than All Critics, you’ll see that the score drops to just 47%. That aligns even more closely with All Audiences. Curiouser and curiouser.

I haven’t seen it myself yet. This is not a review, obviously. 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, like Beauty and the Beast, I think to myself after, “Well, I’d prefer to just watch the original!”

And honestly: Wouldn’t you?

UPDATE #1: Movie Review

The Little Mermaid Review: A Delightful Surprise

There’s a fun scene in the new Little Mermaid live-action movie where Ariel snags a hat for Prince Eric, plopping it on his head playfully after snatching it off the head of the street vendor. Later, Scuttle steals the hat in order to get the pair to follow the bird down to the lagoon so that they could serenade the would-be-lovers with a slightly altered version of Kiss The Girl.

Well, speaking of hats it’s time I ate mine. I was deeply skeptical about this latest Disney remake. I’ve been burnt out on the whole project for quite some time and thought this would be another soulless cash grab from the House of Mouse. I was wrong. The critics must be crazy, because this is an absolutely delightful picture and is quite possibly my favorite of all the princess live-action remakes.

Much of that is due to the powerful performance—and singing chops—of lead Halle Bailey as Ariel. She is wonderful throughout, perfectly capturing everything we loved about the original Ariel, but adding a little bit more depth and adventurousness to the character. She and Jonah Hauer-King as Prince Eric have splendid chemistry, which certainly helps. Indeed, the entire cast is marvelous and the remakes of the old songs are truly fun and delightful.

Is it a perfect film? Absolutely not. There are a handful of new songs and the only one I liked is the Scuttle rap, performed by Awkwafina with a bit of Sebastian harmonizing. Daveed Diggs is great as the grumpy crab majordomo.

But the new song for Prince Eric is forgettable, as is Ariel’s new number. They pale in comparison to Under the Sea and Part of Your World, both of which are wonderfully adapted here. Bailey’s singing voice really elevates Part of Your World to a whole new level. It’s brilliant. But I do miss the cartoon version of Under the Sea, with all the fish on their musical instruments. And I wish they’d given Ariel and Eric a duet.

My biggest complaint is the fish. I don’t like the attempt to make Sebastian and Flounder (Jacob Tremblay) look “realistic.” You lose a lot of the fun expressiveness of these characters going this route. I’m thrilled the movie was so bright and colorful after the trailers made it look much less so, but I just sincerely dislike the art direction for the aquatic creatures.

Rounding out the cast we have Javier Bardem as King Triton where he does a very good job as the strict-then-relenting father. His emotional farewell to Ariel hit all the right notes. (His multi-racial brood of daughters makes you think he really got around under the sea, too).

I was skeptical of Melissa McCarthy as Ursula, but she does a terrific job as well, really capturing everything about the original villain perfectly. Her comedic timing and charm really pays off here.

All told, this ended up being a really pleasant surprise for me and my kids. We all went in a bit jaded and skeptical and we all left with smiles on our faces, though both my daughter and I cried like babies at the end. I’m a real crier when it comes to the father/daughter or father/son stuff and this tugged at the heartstrings just right. Probably the best of the Disney live-action movies, which I’m shocked—but happy—to report.

I guess you can lump me in with audiences on this one. It’s a treat. I’m still surprised it’s getting this high of an audience review score, but it’s really worth seeing on the big screen. I’m happy to have been wrong!

Here’s my video review:

Update #2: IMDB Makes Chances To User Scores

This movie has really gotten people talking—and arguing—about a whole host of things. While I think the scores at Rotten Tomatoes do appear inflated, even with it being a much better film than I expected, it’s clear that elsewhere major review-bombing is taking place and that a good deal of that is bot-fueled.

I am not reflexively anti-review-bomb. There are times when a product is so bad or so broken or has ludicrous revenue practices (in the case of some video games, for instance, with loot boxes or ridiculously priced micro-transactions) where review-bombing can be seen as another tool in the consumer toolkit. Aside from voting with one’s wallet or posting to social media, consumers have very little power. Review-bombing works kind of like a boycott.

In some circumstances, it has its place. In others, it simply obscures any nuance we’re hoping to achieve. There’s a lot of interesting questions surrounding The Little Mermaid remake, and I don’t think it easily boils down to “racists vs anti-racists” though obviously racism is a factor.

Over at IMDB, the site has taken steps to negate the impact of review-bombing and paint a hopefully more accurate portrait of moviegoers’ true opinions of the film. Reports Gizmodo:

The Disney live action remake saw wide release on May 26, and since then it’s received over 32,000 ratings on IMDb where it currently sits at a 7 out of 10. Out of those, more than 13,000 gave the flick 1 star. A small notice at the top of the ratings page reads: “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.”

According to IMDb’s FAQ, the site publishes “weighted vote averages,” and notifies that “When unusual voting activity is detected, an alternate weighting calculation may be applied in order to preserve the reliability of our system.” The site does not say what kind of mechanism it uses to rate movies.

This isn’t only applied to unusually low reviews:

IMDb has posted this notice in the past for online film vote stuffing, such as with the Bollywood film The Kasmir Files which released in March. In that case, the film was garnering a heap of positive reviews and the mean user rating was weighted lower. Director Vivek Agnihotri complained the site’s review manipulation was “unusual and unethical.”

In all honesty, removing all 1-star and 10-star reviews and leaving the rest would probably result in more accurate scores. Having seen the film, I can say without the shadow of a doubt that it deserves more than 1 star, but a perfect 10 it is not.

Meanwhile, Gizmodo reports that over in Europe things are even worse. The German website Moviepilot has audience scores sitting at .7 / 10 which is clearly the work of trolls and political activists.

All of this is an example of the very culture war scrabbling that I wrote about at the top of this post. If the absurdly high 95% Rotten Tomatoes score is fishy, well so are the absurdly low scores we’re seeing elsewhere. The 13,000 1-star votes at IMDB are certainly fishy, but then so is a website moderating user and audience reviews without transparency.

There are no easy answers here, clearly, and we’re stuck bickering and arguing over a children’s movie. Art imitates life and our entertainment reflects the real world back at us. Movies and TV shows and music and video games become bloody battlefields in these strange latter day culture wars over race and gender and all the rest.

But remember also that the loudest people involved in these wars are chronically online and plugged in, and do not represent the majority on either side. I remain convinced that we all have more in common than we do dividing us. But then again, hope springs eternal.

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