The live-action remake of Disney’s “The Little Mermaid” recently hit theaters in different parts of the world. The film, which had a good opening day box office and was lauded by fans for the on-screen chemistry of its actors, has been subject to racist remarks online even before its release, primarily because Halle Bailey, who is a Black actress, plays the role of Ariel.
IMDb, which is an online source of information for films, television series, and other similar content, is one of the many online sites the public has been visiting to rate the live action remake of the Disney classic.
Since its highly-anticipated release on May 26, the film has garnered a huge number of feedback on IMDb.
As of this writing, the film has a 7 out of 10 rating on the review platform. 39.3 percent or 17,000 of people who rated the film have given it just 1 star.
IMDb has found an uncommon voting activity regarding the film and that an alternate weighing calculation was made in order to maintain the reliability of their system.
“Our rating mechanism has detected unusual voting activity on this title. To preserve the reliability of our rating system, an alternate weighting calculation has been applied,” the notice stated.
The film follows the story of the popular 1989 animated film. The story revolves around the young mermaid protagonist Ariel (Halle Bailey) who sacrificed her voice in order to walk, explore the world of humans, and later fall in love with Prince Eric (Jonah Hauer-King).
Aside from Bailer and Hauer-King, other parts of the star-studded cast are Melissa McCarthy, Javier Bardem, Noma Dumezweni, Art Malik, Daveed Diggs, Jacob Tremblay, and many more.
The 1989 animated film introduced Ariel to the world as a young, white mermaid. However, many did not like that the new film did not follow the original features of Ariel in the animated film.
When the film’s first trailer was dropped last year, about 2 million dislikes, along with disparaging remarks, was given to it, according to a report. Memes that mocked the film for selecting Bailey as the actress for Ariel were also created that time.
This trailer featured Bailey and the song “Part of Your World.” This is one of the occasions when the film became a subject of a major racist backlash from the public.
Aside from IMDb, there were other sites where the live-action film is being reviewed and rated like the American review website Rotten Tomatoes.
As of the moment, users of the platform have given the film a score of 68 percent. It also got 95 percent in the audience score from more than 5,000 reviews.
It was said that Moviepilot, a German site, also presented the film to have a 5.2 out of 10 score. Aside from this, the AlloCiné did the similar thing as IMDbs as they put out a notice about the unusual distribution of ratings on the movie.
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