‘The Little Mermaid’ Review: Halle Bailey Brings The Magic To Disney’s Latest Remake

Melissa McCarthy is opening up about her Gilmore Girls past.

Jodi Benson, the actor that gave voice to Disney’s animated film The Little Mermaid, is showing her support for the live-action adaptation starring Halle Bailey.

Actress Halle Bailey and Darryl Dwayne “DDG” Grandberry Jr. first met through their respective careers.

Disney’s return to live-action takes of their animated vault in the fullest theatrical form happens this weekend with Rob Marshall’s The Little Mermaid which is eyeing a $180M worldwide start.

 features a few tweaks to the story's iconic story and music, but a familiar voice vows that the changes are not only necessary but «beautifully» done.Jodi Benson, the voice actress who provided the voice of Ariel in the 1989 animated film, shared her support for the film's changes during an interview with , pointing out how different the world was when the original movie began recording sessions in 1986. «It's 2023, so we have to grow, we have to learn, we have to be aware of our surroundings,» she says. «We've got to be aware of our growth as humans and what's important now and what maybe isn't as important. Things change.

 features a few tweaks to the story's iconic story and music, but a familiar voice vows that the changes are not only necessary but «beautifully» done.Jodi Benson, the voice actress who provided the voice of Ariel in the 1989 animated film, shared her support for the film's changes during an interview with , pointing out how different the world was when the original movie began recording sessions in 1986. «It's 2023, so we have to grow, we have to learn, we have to be aware of our surroundings,» she says. «We've got to be aware of our growth as humans and what's important now and what maybe isn't as important. Things change.

Halle Bailey saw the viral videos of young black girls happily reacting to clips of the upcoming The Little Mermaid.

The Little Mermaid is opening in theaters in just a couple of more days and many fans are looking forward to it.

Halle Bailey wants her fans to trust what she’s doing.

boasts a star-studded cast that loves one thing even more than working together --  about their time working together!Speaking with ET's Nischelle Turner ahead of the film's May 26 release, Melissa McCarthy and Javier Bardem, who portray Ursula and King Triton, respectively, couldn't help but gush about their leading lady, Halle Bailey.When asked about their favorite song from the new film, Bardem can't help but praise Bailey's rendition of Princess Ariel's iconic tune, «Part of Your World.»«What she does with her voice in that song, it's very special. And also, it's the first song in the movie,» he notes.

“The Little Mermaid” hasn’t even hit theatres yet, and fans are already asking for a spin-off series focusing on the adventures of the film’s three beloved sea creatures — Flounder the fish, Ariel’s best friend; Sebastian the crab, King Triton’s royal court composer; and Scuttle the seagull, Ariel’s friend and self-proclaimed expert on human stuff.

Halle Bailey is prioritizing her privacy as her star shines brighter every day.In conversation with for their May cover story, the 23-year-old shared how she strives to ensure the attention doesn't overwhelm her as fans gear up for the release of on May 26 and  on Dec. 25.«Mentally, sometimes it's really difficult being in this industry,» she tells the outlet, «knowing that there are so many opinions [about] you and what you're doing, or what you should be or what you could be doing better.

Halle Bailey is just three days out from the anticipated release of “The Little Mermaid” and, ahead of the big day, she’s recounting her reaction to the overwhelming response of young Black girls who gleefully reacted to an Ariel they identified with.

The Little Mermaid star is venturing away from home for the very first time. In her , the 23-year-old singer and actor shared that she moved into her first solo apartment after returning to Los Angeles from London, where she'd been filming the Disney live-action remake. After relocating from Georgia to California with her family in 2012, Halle recently took an important baby step toward independence by moving into a place of her own…in the same building as her 24-year-old sister “It’s nice because we’re neighbors and she’s always there when I need her, but we have our own space,” Halle told Glamour.

The Little Mermaid to the screen, as star Halle Bailey knows all too well. Before she shot to fame as the new Ariel, was half of a well-loved singing duo with her sister , and just one of the starlets Disney was considering for its reimagining of the 1989 animated classic.In 2019, her agent told her that, after seeing her perform at the Grammys, director Rob Marshall wanted her for an audition. Bailey figured the part was “one of the sisters or something like that," she told Glamour exclusively.

stars in the new of The Little Mermaid and, if the gleeful to the first trailer predict anything, it's that the film—which hits theaters Friday—is going to mean a lot to young Black women and girls around the world. “When I saw those [reactions] for the first time, I cried. I just cried," Bailey—who plays Ariel—says i. "I was uncontrollably sobbing because it really pulled on something in my heart.

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Disney’s live-action “The Little Mermaid” is both a faithful and expanded adaptation of the studio’s 1989 animated classic, which featured an iconic voice performance from Jodie Benson as princess Ariel. News broke in April that director Rob Marshall and his “The Little Mermaid” team changed lyrics to classic songs such as “Kiss the Girl” and “Poor Unfortunate Souls” to address matters of consent and more. The love story between Ariel and Prince Eric was also overhauled so that Ariel isn’t simply giving up her voice for the love of a man, which is perhaps the biggest criticism made these days against the 1989 original. “We’re talking about starting our [voiceover] sessions in ’86 [for the original film],” Benson recently told Entertainment Weekly, defending the new film’s decision to update “The Little Mermaid” to contemporary times. “It’s 2023, so we have to grow, we have to learn, we have to be aware of our surroundings.”

The Color Purple is coming!

this year’s CinemaCon that director Blitz Bazawule’s musical adaptation of Alice Walker’s novel is “not your Mama’s ‘Color Purple’,” and based on the first trailer, she’s right. Warner Bros.

Culturally, “The Color Purple” is many different things to many people. To some, it’s the Pulitzer Prize-winning 1982 novel of the same name by Alice Walker, the 1985 adaptation of that novel by Steven Spielberg, and more recently, it’s the 2005 musical with music and lyrics by Brenda Russell, Allee Willis, and Stephen Bray.

Oprah Winfrey and Steven Spielberg have reunited to revive “The Color Purple” into a movie musical. After debuting footage for distributors at CinemaCon last month, Warner Bros. has released the first trailer of the new adaptation, directed by Blitz Bazawule and set to premiere in North America on Dec.

 presents the proclamation for viewers with their first look at the Blitz Bazawule-directed reimagining of the story made iconic in the 1982 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Alice Walker, the 1985 Warner Bros. Pictures film and the Tony Award-winning stage musical.Called a «revival» by producer Oprah Winfrey during the trailer's presentation, the preview gives a brief look at how the film tells the powerful and heartbreaking story of Celie, a young Black woman living in the South from the early to mid-1900s, who finds strength in an extraordinary sisterhood and unbreakable bond.«The reason this moment is so important is because for as long as there is a need for self-discovery, self-empowerment, as long as there's a need for victory in someone's life, as long as there's a need for people to know what it feels like to be loved up and to be made full and whole through somebody's love, there will be a need for ,» Winfrey told journalists. Steven Spielberg and Quincy Jones serve as producers alongside Winfrey, a full-circle moment for the trio since Spielberg directed the film adaptation in which Winfrey made her film debut and Jones produced. Fantasia Barrino makes her major motion picture debut by reprising the role of adult Celie, which she first portrayed in her Broadway debut in 2007 and won a Theatre World Award for. Danielle Brooks stars alongside her as Sofia, a role that she played on Broadway during the 2015 revival production, which earned her a Tony Award nomination.The star-studded cast includes Taraji P.

latest flesh-and-blood cash grab that’s more lifeless than far better two-dimensional painted drawings.The magic and soul of the studio’s animated classics never, ever translate to this colder, realistic context, and still they keep churning them out.   Why learn their lesson? “The Lion King” and “Beauty and the Beast” both grossed over $1 billion. The movies don’t need to be high-quality because the titles and logos do the heavy-lifting for them. While director Rob Marshall (“Chicago”) and writer David Magee make enough prudent changes to ensure their musical film functions efficiently, many alterations seem to exist only to achieve a bloated two-hour runtime or to wedge Lin-Manuel Miranda’s name into the end credits.For instance, when a smitten Prince Eric (Jonah Hauer-King) takes speechless Ariel (Halle Bailey) around his island kingdom, the Caribbean carriage ride is more of the “Gilligan’s Island” length — a three-hour tour.  That’s one of many middling efforts to deepen the prince’s character from just a smile on legs.

Halle Bailey and Melissa McCarthy are joined by director Rob Marshall as they walk the red carpet for the the Australian premiere of The Little Mermaid on Monday (May 22) in Sydney, Australia.

The Little Mermaid,” there is a sense that a true loss of innocence is on the brink. In this new live-action adaptation things are not as bubblegum sweet and bright as the last time we visited Ariel’s story.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Here’s the funny thing about “The Little Mermaid”: Ariel spends most of the film wishing she were human, wondering what it’s like to go walking around on those … what do you call ’em? But practically every girl who sees the movie dreams of swimming in the opposite direction — which is to say, they want to be mermaids … or else an animated Disney princess. “The seaweed is always greener in somebody else’s lake,” as the song goes, and the most important thing about remaking this particular favorite for a fresh generation is maintaining the fantasy that any of us can be Ariel, when in fact, it takes a one-in-a-million talent like Halle Bailey to fill those flippers on-screen.

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Halle Bailey recently praised her “The Little Mermaid” co-star Melissa McCarthy for teaching her how to speak up and say what works for her on set, but there was a time when McCarthy herself wasn’t always so vocal. In a recent interview with The Observer, McCarthy revealed she once became sick due to working on a toxic set that left many of the cast and crew “weeping.” The experience led McCarthy to realize she can’t remain quiet amid inappropriate working conditions. “I did work for someone once who ran such a volatile, hostile set that it made me physically ill,” McCarthy said. “My eyes were swelling up, I was absorbing all of this nuttiness.”

The star of Disney’s big-budget live action remake of The Little Mermaid, due in theaters on May 26, says seeing a black mermaid on screen when she was younger would have “changed my whole life.”

Halle Bailey put in the work to play Ariel in The Little Mermaid.

, is finally coming to the big screen on Friday, May 26. After making a big splash when Disney dropped the first trailer last year, the live-action remake has been one of the most highly anticipated films of 2023.As we get closer to the film's release, tickets to see  are now on sale and people are pouring in to watch this movie in theaters. Be prepared for your breath to be taken away when the movie premieres next week by securing your tickets now.Enjoy the classic story of in Disney's live-action remake.

Disney is taking some heat following news yesterday that it will be removing dozens of titles from its Disney+ and Hulu streaming services on May 26, including some LGBTQ+-themed content.

The soundtrack for The Little Mermaid has been released!

Halle Bailey was reduced to tears as she recorded 'Part of Your World' amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The 23-year-old singer plays Ariel in the 'Little Mermaid' movie and Halle has revealed that she developed a deeper connection with her character during the health crisis. Halle - who was working overseas in the UK and Italy at the time - told PEOPLE magazine: "We were filming in the height of the pandemic, and I was suddenly living alone away from everything I knew.

Film fans who take in Disney’s new live-action remake of “The Little Mermaid” may leave the cinema wondering what the filmmakers have against Kate Middleton.

Yikes! This fairytale couple is stirring up some very real drama!

EXCLUSIVE: After a herniated disc during a Cats performance prompted Rob Marshall to switch from dancer to director, his first feature, Chicago, won Best Picture. It has been a charmed run for Marshall since, with hits from Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides to Memoirs of a Geisha, Nine, Annie, Into the Woods and Mary Poppins Returns. Rarely has Marshall been as charged up as he is after coming through a four-year ordeal to turn Disney’s 1989 2-D animated classic musical The Little Mermaid into a live action feature. Beyond the logistical complexities of staging a musical set half undersea and the other half on land where the title character sacrifices her voice for a chance at life as a human, the film is the most color blind major studio adaptation of a classic property you’ve ever seen.