Plenty of Disney+ users have made The Little Mermaid a part of their world, the streaming service announced Monday.
In the first five days since its Disney+ release on Sept. 6, The Little Mermaid — the live-action reimagining of the 1989 Oscar-winning animated classic — has collected 16 million views worldwide, according to the platform. To count the number of “views,” Disney divides a title’s total viewing time by its run time, which is the same process that it used to recently assess the early streaming numbers for the premiere episode of Star Wars series Ahsoka. (Netflix also uses the same formula to calculate views for its own weekly top 10 lists.)
The figure represents solid interest in director Rob Marshall’s feature that hit theaters May 26 en route to collecting over $560 million at the global box office. By comparison, Hocus Pocus 2 — which was released directly to Disney+ last October — had more than 26 million views in its first three days just in the United States, based on Nielsen streaming figures.
This announcement comes as the Writers Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA have pushed for residuals or revenue sharing based on viewership numbers from streaming platforms.
The Little Mermaid stars Halle Bailey, Melissa McCarthy, Javier Bardem, Daveed Diggs and Awkwafina. The first full trailer that was released in March generated more than 108 million global views in its first 24 hours via broadcast television and digital, marking the biggest figure for a Disney live-action title since 2019’s The Lion King.
In her review for The Hollywood Reporter, critic Lovia Gyarkye wrote that Bailey “doesn’t disappoint” in the title role and added, “Like other live-action remakes, The Little Mermaid is a neatly packaged story ribboned with representational awareness. There’s enough in it to fill an evening, but it doesn’t inspire much more than a passing sense of déjà vu.”
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