W hen Total Film last met director Rob Marshall - in New York, in 2018, as he was beginning the press tour on Mary Poppins Returns in earnest - rumours were bubbling that his next project would also involve revisiting another beloved Disney property. Live-action versions of The Jungle Book and Beauty and the Beast were proving what big business the vault could yield (taking $967m and $1.27bn at the box office respectively). The Little Mermaid seemed ideally suited for the treatment, but Marshall (best known for musicals like the Oscar-winning Chicago) was still in the ‘we’ll see’ stage then. ‘There’s a lot of work to do,’ he pondered when TF asked if he was heading under the sea. ‘There’s one underwater sequence in [Mary Poppins Returns], and I was like, “Wow, that was complicated enough.”’
Cut to five years later, and work is almost complete on Marshall’s The Little Mermaid. So, what convinced him to dive in? ‘I have no interest in taking an animated film, and doing a full-on remake of it; like an honest-to-God remake,’ he says candidly. ‘I really thought: the only reason to do this is if we can bring something else to this.’
The recent Disney remakes have varied from shot-for-shot adaptations to much looser interpretations of the cherished childhood favourites. What helped Marshall find a way in was going back to the source: Hans Christian Andersen’s 1837 fairy tale on which the 1989 animated film was loosely based. ‘It’s actually a modern story, in a way, of a young girl who feels displaced; who
