Disney+ Hit A New Record Thanks To The Little Mermaid

If the breathless tone in Disney's latest PR announcement is to be believed, this year's live-action remake of "The Little Mermaid" is well on its way to conquering air, land, and sea. After a fairly solid theatrical box office run that saw the film perform well domestically and somewhat less so internationally (all told, the film has fallen well short of the billion-dollar standard set by past successes like "The Lion King" or "Aladdin"), the film made its PVOD debut back in July and is set to arrive on physical media later this month, where shareholders surely hope it will continue to rake in the dough. But streaming might as well be considered the final frontier for the Halle Bailey-starring blockbuster and, according to the studio, the film's debut on Disney+ has shattered a new record.

Disney didn't hesitate to take to its official website and announce that "The Little Mermaid" made waves upon its recent premiere on Disney+ streaming. According to the press release, the remake racked up 16 million "views" in only its first five days, making it the company's "most viewed Disney movie premiere on Disney+ since 'Hocus Pocus 2.'" That certainly sounds like another serious accomplishment on top of the movie's other successes, proving that the "Go woke, go broke" crowd has once again failed to account for a very simple idea: the vast majority of general audiences (meaning the average person who spends more time offline than online) just don't care about all the culture war nonsense that YouTubers peddle on a regular basis.

But, as is usually the case with these sorts of internal metrics, a deeper look at the numbers demands more critical analysis. 

Would it surprise regular readers of /Film that this very topic has everything to do with the ongoing WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes?

First and most obviously, there's the little matter of how studios continue to insist they're unable to provide precise viewership numbers to the unions, which conveniently complicates the idea of implementing viewership-based residuals for streaming shows and movies. Yet, somehow, major companies like Disney magically find the ability to scrounge up enough data to boast about the views for their latest blockbusters. Folks, the math definitely ain't mathing.

Secondly, there's the matter of actually defining one's terms. Studios have increasingly muddied the waters by relying on wildly different metrics that seem to change with each and every press release. For example, Disney previously reported the viewership numbers on "Hocus Pocus 2" in terms of "minutes watched," an intentionally vague and undefined term — not views, as they just did for "The Little Mermaid." As if that weren't confusing enough, however, this latest announcement comes with an ending disclaimer noting that views aren't really views. According to Disney, "A view is defined as total stream time divided by runtime." I'm the furthest thing from a mathematical genius, I admit, but I have several questions about how accurate such measurements truly are. Suddenly, "16 million views" feels less like 16 million individual Disney+ accounts watched the actual movie from beginning to end, and more like an arbitrary number pulled out of a made-up algorithmic equation.

So while it's easy to believe that "The Little Mermaid" is performing well on streaming, is it truly on a record-breaking pace? We don't really know, and that's the entire problem here. In short, studios need better viewership transparency so they can pay their writers and actors what they're owed.