Last week ‘The Little Mermaid’ opened, and the numbers were fairly good, at least domestically. Now it faces competition from ‘Spider-Man: Across The Spiderverse’, which performed better in its opening weekend than the little mermaid did with a four-day opener.

‘Spider-Man: Across the Spiderverse’ opened with a three-day total of $120.5 million domestically and globally if totaled $208.6 million. Meanwhile, ‘The Little Mermaid’ opened to $95 million for the same three-day time frame and $117 million for four days. Globally it brought in $164 million.

Interestingly enough, the media blames the lower performance of ‘The Little Mermaid’ on “racism,” especially overseas and in China, where it only brought in $2.63 million on its opening weekend.  However, China embraced Miles Morales, and the country ended up being the largest international audience, with 17.3 million. Now, that’s now where near the total ‘Fast X’ saw with $78.3 million for its opening in China, but ‘Spider-Man: Across the Spiderverse’ did at almost 7X the amount of ‘The Little Mermaid.’

Given its performance domestically, which was the largest opening day for a film in 2023, the “racism” argument used for ‘The Little Mermaid’ seem less likely. Maybe people are tired of Disney’s live-action “reimaginings?”

Ariel and friends faced an almost 60% drop this weekend to around $40.6 million domestically. It’s now sitting at about $186.2 million after its second weekend. Globally, it brought in about $42 million for a global total of $326.7 million after two weekends.

It will be interesting to see how these movies perform as time goes on.

What do you think? Comment and let us know.