Although the first thing we think of when we hear the title The Little Mermaid may be the Disney animated film, the Hans Christian Andersen story has been around since the 1800s. In other words, it’s public domain. That means that anybody can make a The Little Mermaid movie if they want to, so that’s what Conglomerate Media and Kingsway Productions did with their own live-action version. Based on the just-released trailer (via Vulture), their adaptation definitely includes a mermaid that could be considered little by some standards, but that’s pretty much where sticking to the source material ends.
The Disney version is relatively faithful to Andersen’s original story, in that it’s about a mermaid who wants to live on land after falling in love with a human prince. This time around, things are very, very different. There’s a journalist tasked with covering a public exhibition of a mermaid in Mississippi… and also she has legs sometimes and her carney captor has her soul in a vial and there’s a little girl who might also be a mermaid.Calling your movie The Little Mermaid just because you can doesn’t make this anything close to the Disney film we grew up with, or even the fairy tale it’s based on. Still, we’ll give this the benefit of the doubt because we’re open-minded people, but if this ends up going south, we still have Disney’s own live-action version to look forward to. They have Lin Manuel-Miranda on board for theirs, so color us excited.
Featured image: Conglomerate Media
Mermaids are great, but here are a few more WTF-esque creatures from movie history
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