“The Little Mermaid” star Halle Bailey is feeling “awe” over the reaction to the first trailer for the live-action movie, which debuted September 9 at D23. The clip includes a first look at Billy singing “Part of Your World
Like mermaid Ariel. Parents on TikTok uploaded clips of their young children watching the 90-second trailer, which found its way to Bailey herself.
“People have been sending these reactions to me all weekend, and I’m really in awe,” Billy wrote on Twitter while sharing a video of young black girls getting emotional while watching the trailer. “It means the world to me.”
Kerry Washington also shared a great story of black girls responding to the “Little Mermaid” teaser. One of the girls in the onscreen video shouts, “She’s like me! She’s like me!” when Ariel appears to Billy for the first time.
“I can’t stop watching this,” Washington wrote. “Halle Bailey, do you see what you’re doing to us?”
Rob Marshall directed the live-action movie “The Little Mermaid,” starring Billy opposite David Diggs, Jacob Tremblay, Awkwafina, Jonah Hauer-King, Javier Bardem and Melissa McCarthy. While many defended the casting of Bailey, she was subjected to a racist backlash on social media from some fans who are upset that the black actor plays Ariel. The hashtag #NotMyAriel appeared on Twitter after Bailey was chosen, but she told diverse That her family helped her shake off the backlash. Bailey’s grandparents shared their own memories with her of the racism and discrimination they experienced in their lives.
“It was such an inspiring and beautiful thing to hear those words of encouragement, and to say to me, ‘You don’t understand what this is doing to us, and to our community, to all the little black and brown girls who are going to see themselves in it,'” said Bailey.
Bailey also overcame the backlash by thinking about how this acting affected her as a young girl. “What that would have done for me, how would that have changed my confidence, my faith in myself, everything,” she said. “Things that seem too small to everyone else, are too big for us.”
As I mentioned diverseThe teaser “The Little Mermaid” garnered 104 million views worldwide during its first online weekend. This number is higher than all of Disney’s recently viewed live sponsored videos, including “Cruella” (68 million views), “Beauty and the Beast” (94 million views), “Aladdin” (74 million views), and ” Maleficent 2″ (62 million views). Due to Queen Elizabeth II’s death on Thursday, the “Little Mermaid” metrics did not include opinions from the United Kingdom, Ireland and Australia.
Disney “The Little Mermaid” is scheduled to open in theaters on May 26, 2023.
[ad_2]
