The Little Mermaid: The Opening Weekend Box Office and the Outlook for the Long-Term Gross

In its second weekend in release Disney's live-action remake of The Little Mermaid grossed over $40 million domestically, raising its total to $186 million--actually a bit better than the Boxoffice Pro folks anticipated this weekend. (They had in mind a figure of $179 million.)

The result is that, given its strong parallel with preceding Disney films, among them the similarly Memorial Day weekend-released Aladdin (which similarly grossed $90 million+ in its first Friday-to-Sunday period, $40 million+ in its second, and $186 million in its first ten days), I still expect it to, if fading a little faster (with a weekend-to-weekend drop of 57 percent, as against Aladdin's 53 percent), break $300 million fairly easily, with a domestic gross north of $350 million not necessarily out of reach (and barring some collapse, not end up much lower than that in the worst case).

Of course, this may not be all that the film's backers and supporters hoped for. (Thanks to inflation Aladdin's $356 million in the summer of 2019 would be more like $420 million+ in the summer of 2023, so that even matching Aladdin would leave the gross one-sixth down relative to the other movie.) Still, it would be far from the disaster some are speaking of--if that was all that mattered. The international market generally delivered 65 percent+ of the global gross for Disney's big-budget live-action remakes of its animated classics in recent years--and the opening weekend raised real doubts about that. (It actually looked like it was going to be the other way around, the domestic market delivering close to two-thirds of the money.)

Has the film's second weekend in play changed that? The movie's overseas gross now stands at $140 million--a good deal less than what it has made at home, and working out to approximately 43 percent of the global total. This is actually about the same figure we had at the end of the first three days (when the movie made about $68 million of the $164 million then grossed, 42 percent of the total). Assuming the pattern continues I would expect The Little Mermaid to finish up with somewhere around $600 million globally on the basis of what we have seen so far, near the lower end of the $600-$700 million range predicted here last week.