Interest is being driven by girls, moms and other females, similar to Beauty and the Beast, whose audience was 70 percent female.

The movie features a score from multiple Oscar winner Alan Menken, as well as new songs from Lin-Manuel Miranda.

Action-comedy The Machine and Robert De Niro comedy About My Father also open nationwide but aren’t expected to clear more than $5 million or $6 million in their domestic debuts.

The Machine, from Screen Gems, stars Bert Kreischer and is inspired by the comedian’s stand-up act of the same name. Mark Hamill co-stars.

https://www.glamour.com/story/halle-bailey-cover-story

Halle Bailey Is the Moment—And a Movie Star in the Making

After spending almost half her life as part of a musical duo, the 23-year-old is about to step into her own as an actor in not one but two high-profile remakes of beloved classics, The Little Mermaid and The Color Purple. Expectations are soaring (have you seen the videos of little girls reacting to her Ariel?), but Bailey is more than ready.

It’s a rainy afternoon in Beverly Hills, and Halle Bailey is coziness personified. Curled up on a hotel couch wearing a teal Ivy Park hoodie and matching shorts, she sips the green tea she ordered us from room service and wants to talk about…reality TV. Upon hearing that I’ve never seen one of her favorite shows, she audibly gasps. “Love After Lockup is amazing,” she says, describing the premise of the We TV show, which documents the love lives of former inmates after they’re released from prison. “Some of [their] partners buy houses for them and go all out and truly fall in love. It’s so good. You have to watch it.”

The fact that the 23-year-old has time to watch even a single episode feels like a scheduling feat of epic proportion. At the time of our meeting in March, the singer and actor had spent the last nine days logging multiple studio sessions for her forthcoming solo album, wrapping up postproduction work for her role in the upcoming musical movie adaptation of 1985 drama The Color Purple, and planning a birthday trip “someplace warm” the following week. And then there were the Academy Awards.

“The Oscars were amazing,” Bailey says. “I had so much anxiety and nervousness because it was the big debut of the trailer, but it ended up being a fairy-tale kind of night.”

The trailer, of course, is for the upcoming live-action remake of Disney’s The Little Mermaid, in which Bailey stars as Ariel. “It’s been a long time coming,” Bailey says of the film’s release, which is one the year’s most anticipated movies. “I auditioned for the film when I was 18, and I turned 23 this year.” As she tells it, the journey began in 2019, when she got an email from her agent saying director Rob Marshall wanted her to audition for his adaptation of the 1989 animated classic. Bailey assumed she’d be auditioning for “one of the sisters or something like that” but later learned Marshall had watched her performance at the Grammys earlier that year and thought she’d make the perfect Disney princess. It took a minute for it to sink in that she was being sought for the lead.

“I was almost just paralyzed with fear,” Bailey says, adding that she leaned heavily on her sister Chlöe to help her prepare. “We’d run it and we’d run it and we’d run it, over and over,” she says of her audition tape, which included two scenes and a performance of the seminal song “Part of Your World.” A trip to New York to meet Marshall and producer John DeLuca followed. Then came a series of callbacks followed by the all-important screen test that included a mock costume and a fake set. Then the waiting began.

“I didn’t hear anything for a while—a few months actually,” she says. “I was like, ‘Okay, well, I guess I didn’t get it.’ I forgot about it completely.” And then came a phone call in July 2021 from a strange number, one Bailey said she’d seen pop up a few times and ignored. Eventually, at the insistence of her father, her sister, and her younger brother—all hanging out in the family’s garage studio that summer day—she picked up

“I freaked out, I was screaming,” she says of her reaction to the news that she’d been cast as Ariel. “I was like, Is this real life?” Then, she says, “I was catapulted into this new world.”

Born in Mableton, Georgia, Bailey moved to Dunwoody, a suburb of Atlanta, at age eight before relocating in late 2012 with her parents and three siblings to Los Angeles, where she and Chlöe formed their musical duo, Chloe x Halle, when they were 13 and 11, uploading covers of pop and R&B hits to their YouTube channel. Their rendition of “Pretty Hurts” went viral in 2013, and two years later they signed to Beyoncé’s Parkwood Entertainment. By 2021 the sisters had released two albums and earned four Grammy nominations.

When Bailey was offered the part of Ariel, she was accustomed to fame, but not as a solo act. She told Chlöe she didn’t think she could do it, and her sister scoffed at the self-doubt. Bailey recalls her saying, “You must, you have to, and you have to fly. This is your moment.” The message resonated, and Bailey soon found herself on set, filming alongside costars Javier Bardem (King Triton), Melissa McCarthy (Ursula the Sea Witch), Jonah Hauer-King (Prince Eric), and Jacob Tremblay (Flounder). For a young woman who grew up idolizing Ariel—but also internalizing that aspirational characters rarely, if ever, looked like her—the opportunity was profound.

“I remember Ariel being the reason I wanted to swim,” says Bailey, who fell in love with the original Little Mermaid when she was five. “When I saw her, [I was] like, ‘She’s so beautiful; I want to be a mermaid too.’ She didn’t look like me, but I was okay with that because it was what I was used to at the time.”

Earlier this year, when the first images of Bailey as Ariel started circulating on social media, the magnitude of the moment—a palpable shift toward a new normal—was felt globally. Videos of young Black girls gleefully reacting to an Ariel they identified with flooded the internet. “When I saw those for the first time, I just cried,” Bailey says. “I was sobbing uncontrollably. The fact that these babies are looking at me and feeling the emotions that they’re feeling is a really humbling, beautiful thing.”

The representation means a lot to Bailey too. Growing up, she says she was moved by the 2009 Disney animated film The Princess and the Frog, in which actor and singer Anika Noni Rose plays the titular princess. “I know how much of that movie changed my whole perspective on life,” she says. “Wow, this is possible. Black princesses are possible. We deserve to take up these spaces too.”

Yeah no shit it was going to do well. It's literally a movie about the first black person being able to swim.

While the live-action Mermaid pulls heavily from the original’s plot and key themes—a young girl seeking independence from her insular, underwater world—Bailey’s take on Ariel is more nuanced. “I really hope that I put my own stamp on her character by showing more of her vulnerability,” she says, adding that there are parallels between her own life and Ariel’s. “I felt like I could relate to her growing up in a big family and having older sisters to guide you, and having a father that's very protective and overbearing at times but loves so hard.” Beautywise, the famous mermaid now has locs.

“[Ariel still] has red hair, because that’s a very iconic part of her, but I really did admire the fact that because I’m a Black woman and I have locs, [the producers] wanted to incorporate that into Ariel’s look.” Hairstylist Camille Friend was tasked with a transformation that entailed dyeing Bailey’s roots red and wrapping her locs with hair the same shade; Kat Ali oversaw makeup. “They’re both women of color, so I felt very comfortable,” Bailey says. “They know how to take care of me and my hair and makeup. I’ve been on sets before where that’s not the case.”

While the live-action Mermaid pulls heavily from the original’s plot and key themes—a young girl seeking independence from her insular, underwater world—Bailey’s take on Ariel is more nuanced. “I really hope that I put my own stamp on her character by showing more of her vulnerability,” she says, adding that there are parallels between her own life and Ariel’s. “I felt like I could relate to her growing up in a big family and having older sisters to guide you, and having a father that's very protective and overbearing at times but loves so hard.” Beautywise, the famous mermaid now has locs.

“[Ariel still] has red hair, because that’s a very iconic part of her, but I really did admire the fact that because I’m a Black woman and I have locs, [the producers] wanted to incorporate that into Ariel’s look.” Hairstylist Camille Friend was tasked with a transformation that entailed dyeing Bailey’s roots red and wrapping her locs with hair the same shade; Kat Ali oversaw makeup. “They’re both women of color, so I felt very comfortable,” Bailey says. “They know how to take care of me and my hair and makeup. I’ve been on sets before where that’s not the case.”

Filming took place in London over the course of six months amid the COVID pandemic and the UK shutdown. Though it was “gloomy all the time” and Bailey was away from her family—a first for her—“it was a really cool learning experience and time of development for me on my own,” she says. And along the way she built meaningful relationships with her costars. In Bardem she found an encouraging, seasoned actor who, despite his serious demeanor, is “also the kindest teddy bear man ever.” Newcomer Hauer-King, Bailey says, “will be one of my best friends forever.” The pair spent the most screen time together, bonding over a grueling shoot schedule that saw them jumping off a boat one day and suspended in the air the next. In McCarthy she found a blueprint. “At the end of the film, when we wrapped, I had learned how to speak up for myself,” Bailey says, crediting her newfound confidence to the example set by the actor. “When I watched her go on set, she was like, ‘This is what I want.’ Seeing another woman come in there, command space, and own her power and know who she is as an individual was really inspiring.”

In a sign that landing a role in a major motion picture wasn’t a fluke, Bailey received an audition request for the forthcoming musical film iteration of The Color Purple, backed by Oprah Winfrey and Steven Spielberg, while still shooting The Little Mermaid. In London, Bailey self-taped her audition for a young Nettie—the younger sister of the film’s protagonist, Celie, to be played by R&B singer and actor Fantasia Barrino who’d performed the role on Broadway in 2007—and learned that she had landed the part shortly after filming wrapped on Mermaid.

The pressure Bailey had already started to feel about her next project, she says, began to wane. The movie’s musical element was a perfect fit, and the cast was particularly exciting for her. “I’m working with legends who I’m such fans of, like Fantasia and Taraji P. Henson,” she says. Likening the set to a family reunion, she appreciated the respite of having a smaller role than in The Little Mermaid. “Also, I got to be country and talk in my Georgia, Southern accent, which was fun for me.” Bailey went into the project with understandable nerves—“the first one is so iconic you almost don’t want to touch something as precious as that, and the same with Mermaid,” she says—but is pleased with the outcome. “I think people will be really proud of the new version.”

>>1170844
This

they can fake the ratings all they want but this boonified garbage will never really be considered canon.

>>1170876
How does one fake $120 million?

>>1170844
>>1170858
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simone_Manuel
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cullen_Jones
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashleigh_Johnson
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Nesty
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enith_Brigitha

>>1170832
delete this thread or the stormfags raiding /tv/ right now will come here

>>1170903
It was a joke anon, relax.

>>1170894
$20/adult and $15/child tickets help. A four day "weekend" (ever since they started including Fridays in the weekend box office numbers) and zero competition, unless you want to watch #MenToo.

>>1170961
That doesn't answer the question. How does a film studio fake $120 million of ticket sales?

>>1170832
>make soulless low effort remake slop
>if you don't like it you're a racist
Every time

>>1170832
yidsney gonna buy up all the tickets to fudge the numbers like they did for captain marvel?

so many empty theaters lmfao

>>1170876
> Interest is being driven by girls, moms and other females

Wait a minute... That can't be right. Why are so many men upset about this movie then?

>>1170983
wow a new chud cope just dropped

>>1170987
They're not. No one is upset over the movie but incel white nationalists.

>>1170992
Cmon mate, incel white nationalist are men too. Behave.

>>1170987
Only reason I hate it is for the same reason I hate all the other live-action remakes of Disney animated features. I half expect the casting choices to be edgy to stimulate interest in what would otherwise just be seen as a retread of old intellectual properties.

>>1170997
How many times did you watch the original Little Mermaid? Ever asked you mom for one of those Disney princess dolls?

>>1170952
Humor is funny when it reflects reality. Black Olympic medalists in swimming is counter to the narrative that "blacks can't swim"

>>1170997
I hate Disney live action remakes cause they're just lazy and uncreative. I mean, it was cool the first couple of times they did it, but not every fucking movie in their history needs a live action remake. I don't need a goddamn live action version of The Rescuers Down Under.

>>1170832
ITT soylibs scramble over their funkopops to white knight for megacorporations yet again

>>1170987
>>1170992
>>1170996
>u r upset
>u r angry
why always this same chatGPT response

we just saying it is shit on an anime imageboard, and it is, and lots of people from around the world agree

https://i.4cdn.org/wsg/1685064709159613.webm

if there is something worth being upset and angry over it is this, boomers made our lives and futures worse by believing you are equals and granting you "civil rights" in good faith

>Around 90% of experts believed that genes had at least some influence on cross-national differences in cognitive ability.

>In the current study, experts attributed the low results in sub-Saharan Africa to genetic-evolutionary factors (18.58%), followed by educational quality (12.27%), health (11.73%), and educational quantity (11.60%).

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00399/full

everyone intelligent knows diversity is a mistake, that you are violent, low intelligence, a net cost to the economy and you are not even grateful for being paid for, you hate white people and see fit to violate their rights and drag them down, that the melting pot experiment worked with europeans but not other groups, but I don't really feel any strong emotions, it is just a fact of life like death and taxes, that we live in this insane dystopia where you can't state the obvious about your scientifically proven deficiencies and your hate and hostility for us regardless of all that we do for you to try and uplift you

>>1171067
t. gives the world's richest man $8/month for a checkmark

>>1171076
Stop trying to pretend there are more than 1000 people worldwide who care about the casting choices in this movie.

>>1171022
>Humor is funny when it reflects reality.
You are autistic. That isn't how humor works at all.

>>1171085
Are you claiming humor is blatant lies with no grounding in reality? So, Fox News is humor?

>>1171088
Unmitigated mental illness on your part.

>>1171027
>not every fucking movie in their history needs a live action remake
It does now because they are utterly creatively bankrupt
This is nu-disney's version of the eisner era straight-to-video shitty sequels

>>1171088
Fox News is pretty funny, yeah. checkmate atheists.

The audience score is at 95% now. It's unironically over.

>>1171141
Time to memoryhole the opposition campaign

>>1171076
I'm genuinely wondering why a grown man who has never seen the original cares so much about the casting for this movie, just because the lead is black. To the point where they're posting bizarre statistics that have nothing to do with the thread topic.

>>1171146
His favorite white European fairy tale has been co-opted by Hollywood popcorn merchants and sullied with blackamoors.

>>1171146
Because this is the most astonishingly awful board

>>1171148
The original "Little Mermaid" wasn't even a fairy tale though, was it? It was a tragedy, written by a gay Dane. That's what a certain demographic of men are upset about...

>>1171022
Comedy has no rules.

>>1171151
>That's what a certain demographic of men are upset about...
There aren't enough incels who care about the movie to call them a demographic. They are an outlier to other much larger demographics.

>>1170844
Why are Republicans so racist and unhinged? What is the meaning of this? Is it really nothing more than senseless screaming and violence?

>>1170968
>if i dont personally like a movie it is low quality so called "slop" made with the intention of gaslighting people into being a bigot
Typical conservatives

>>1171101
I accept your concession

>>1171281
Poor socioeconomic factors. Not being ironic. They're as poor as the minorities they hate and that's very scary to the white man.

>>1171282
>whiteknighting megacorporations
Typical libtard

>>1170832
Big doubt. They expected the same from Ms. Marvel and ended up having to buy their own tickets to give them to schools and women's groups. I won't hold my breath. I kinda wish they gave a purchasing breakdown so we could see how many are individual and small-batch (<7 or so) purchases vs bulk purchases.

>>1171310
Ms Marvel wasn't a film. It was a show on Disney+.

>>1170846
>They’re both women of color, so I felt very comfortable
Imagine it was a white actress saying she was comfortable for having white hairdressers

>>1171316
It would be a non-issue, cause white people go to white salons all the time?

>>1171022
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-11172054.amp
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/nearly-60-percent-black-children-cant-swim-flna1c9459353

>>1171310
If you're talking about Captain Marvel it grossed over 1.1 billion dollars. Why would you lie about something so easily disprovable?

>>1170832
Well I gotta say casting was on point. They got someone straight from Innsmouth to play the lead fish person.

So.. uh, if it doesn't make 120 million in the next couple days then we're right about this being a poor casting choice, correct?
In fact, after watching the trailer, it appears the entire movie was filled with poor casting choices aside from Melissa McCarthy as Ursula.

>>1170832
120 million is actually not very good. Pirates of the Caribbean made 135m on opening day (in 2006), which when adjusted for todays inflation is roughly 243m.

>>1171547
It's the standard for a movie theatre blockbuster in the 20's.
I think even the latest capeshit movie had a $200 million opening weekend.
Mario pulled $140.
Honestly, I'll be shocked if this gets it's projection of 120. I ready to laugh my ass off.
However, I don't believe they'd make a claim without some way to back it. They've probably been giving away tickets or something.

>>1170876
Touch grass

>>1171547
People have more options for entertainment now than 2006. Streaming services didn't really exist back then. Also, Pirates of the Caribbean 2 was an anomaly. It was (at the time) the third highest grossing movie of all-time (only behind Titanic and LotR: Return of the King)

>>1170987
No one cares except the eternally butthurt white supremacists.

>>1171556
I don't even think they really care. This entire thing is a joke and a black Little Mermaid is a modern day curio forged from the insanity of the zeitgeist.
Unfortunately no one is as enraged as you believe they are and any mention of it is designed to show you how ridiculous the world has become.
For now I'll just sit back and wait for the Anne Frank movie staring an African Muslim and see how well that's received.

>>1171557
>How ridiculous the world has become
A black girl mermaid is not a good example of how ridiculous the world has become. You are a little bitch

>>1171573
What a dummy
You don't have reading comprehension

Your no-brained bullshit is part of that example of how ridiculous the world has become

Calling someone a bitch when you're too stupid to even understand them (and are probably way too stupid to realize this) is ridiculous

>>1171588
stay hydrated, we wouldn't want you to suffer the ill effects of crying your eyes out over a disney character

>>1171589
Another example
Ridiculoius
What a stupid response
You should be embarrassed to be this stupid

>>1171590
just because you're meta upset over a disney character doesn't mean you're not upset over a disney character. you're a grown man aren't you, move on

>>1171591
Thanks for supporting my point with proof

>>1171315
>ACKSHUALLY CHUD
lmfao
>>1171443
yidsney defense force fucking SEETHING

>>1171594
liberals love to white knight for megacorporations. and then they pretend to hate the rich

>>1171594
>lie
>twice
>and reveal lack of knowledge of the subject
>double down with no acknowledgement the narrative is falling apart
Who you shilling for? More importantly, how pathetic is the pay?
Please don't tell me you do this for free...

>>1171608
Good post

>>1171594
>ACKSHUALLY CHUD
How can a company pay for box office tickets for a TV show?
Why are people like this? Instead of just acknowledging they are factually incorrect, they double down and antagonize the person correcting them. I wasn't even arguing with you, I was just correcting your wrong statement.

>>1170832
>all 2023 disney movies only make 3x opening weekend (360m)
>needs 700-800m to break even
they're about to lose millions

>>1171022
>Humor is funny when it reflects reality.
But niggers really can't swim.

>>1170965
Accounting Dept lies.

>>1171786
Considering the fact there are black Olympic medalists in swimming, I guess those years, all races of people couldn't swim. Or at least not as good as blacks.

>>1171796
It's because of their high ankle bone.

>>1171146
>cultural appropriation is A-OK when it's stealing from crackers

Hypocrite.

>>1171642
>ACKSHUALLY I was correcting you

I'm not even the faggot that confused the tv show and movie so you aren't correcting jack shit. Your non-rebuttal and over inflated sense of ego is astounding.

>>1171608
You are legitimately fucking retarded.

Pro-tip: Replies don't all come from the same anon. I'm not the faggot that confused the tv show and movie.

Boy you sure schooled me.

>>1171914
>>1171915
Why inject yourself into a conversation only to antagonize others?

>>1171916
>Why inject yourself into a conversation only to antagonize others?
Hold on... okay... just needed to check and verify what site I was on.

<meme> First time? </meme>

Mermazulu watch:
Currently it's projected to bring in just shy of 118 million.
AP reports as of 3 hours ago it's pulled 95 million. Had it not been a memorial day weekend, that would have been it's grand opening.
https://apnews.com/article/little-mermaid-box-office-disney-fast-x-c412720b88b421663b9e319692987595
>LOS ANGELES (AP) — “ The Little Mermaid ” made moviegoers want to be under the sea on Memorial Day weekend.
(probably homosexual) Journo Andrew Dalton attempts to sing it's praises. Doesn't realize he's really saying "It's so bad people want to drown".
>Disney’s live-action remake of its 1989 animated classic easily outswam the competition, bringing in $95.5 million on 4,320 screens in North America, according to studio estimates Sunday.
Anyway, looks like Ugandan Little Mermaid will make it's not-so-lofty goal by tomorrow.

>>1171930
>First time?
Au contraire. There is nothing intrinsic to 4chan that requires people to antagonize others for no reason. You used to be able to come to this website and have honest, good faith discussion. I assume you're too new to have had that experience.