GM. Over the long holiday weekend, we saw the release of Disney’s live action remake of The Little Mermaid. The announcements and trailers for the film were met with some criticisms around casting and the general look of the CGI characters, which seems like a pretty fair critique when you have a look…

That being said, the movie managed to do $95 million domestically over the weekend. Its worldwide gross currently sits at $195 million. While it was a pretty big opening, with a budget of $250 million, it’s going to be interesting to see whether this becomes profitable or not for Disney. For those that don’t know, the ticket sales need to do more than just surpass the budget; movies usually have an additional marketing spend of anywhere from 40-100% of the movie’s budget. With this being such a high profile movie, we’d guess it was on the higher end, which means its box office run will need to net over $450-500 million. For perspective, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania ended its run with $476 million - a likely loss for Disney, which makes The Little Mermaid’s performance of even greater importance for Disney’s profitability this year.

Possibly of greater interest than the box office discussion surrounding The Little Mermaid is the story that’s been speculating its review scores. With as much criticism the early images and trailers received, people were surprised to see a R*tten T*mat*es audience score of 95% - higher than that of The Jungle Book (a very well received movie). For us, the speculations are anything but false; this is nothing more than Hollywood’s back dealings and smoke and mirror tactics that they have always used and which people are catching onto and moving to independent forms of entertainment as a result. It turns out, that one of the explanations is because the score that is/was being displayed is the “verified audience”. In other words, in less you are crazy enough about movies/Disney (aka not your average movie goer) to have the purchase of your ticket verified, your review doesn’t count. Upon switching to view all reviews, you find the movie currently sits at a whopping 57%. That’s not deceiving at all (sarcasm). And that’s exactly why Peanut Approved exists; to offer an unbiased alternative to the Hollywood establishment machine that protects itself at all costs. We love movies and we want to tell you honestly what’s worth your valuable time and money to go see; leave it to the Hollywood elite and they’ll have you watching whatever it is that protects their pockets and not what’s actually worth seeing.

Also still in theaters is Fast X, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, The Super Mario Bros. Movie, and The Machine. The weekend, we are blessed with Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, which if is anywhere as good as its prequel, will be a great one to get out to the theater and see.

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