Hollywood Has Officially Ran Out Of Ideas | 'Little Mermaid' Gets PG-13 Retelling

Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White; they’re all fairy tale characters that have recently been mined for darker, more adult re-tellings on the big screen. If Hollywood is good at anything, it’s taking a trend and running with it, so it’s no big surprise that Sony is now looking to do a bleak retelling of The Little Mermaid, especially since Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides recently opened and had a big scene full of angry, killer mermaids. I give it two weeks before we’re reporting on a remake of Splash.

“The Little Mermaid” started off as a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, got a very high profile Disney animated adaptation, and eventually inspired Carolyn Turgeon’s book “Mermaid: A Twist on the Classic Tale.” It’s this book that Sony has optioned to turn into a feature. Unlike Disney’s take on the character, this time the story is told not from the perspective of the mermaid, but of a desperate young princess. She needs to marry a prince in order to create a political bond with a rival Kingdom, or her home is pretty much going to be in shambles. So, she makes a long journey to his kingdom in order to try and get the marriage together. Unfortunately, when she gets there she finds out that the prince has already fallen in love with a beautiful young mermaid who has sacrificed her fishy ways in order to spend her life with them. That bitch. The book will be adapted and the film directed by Country Strong’s Shana Feste. No word yet on what the dark spin will be on the reggae singing crab.

Source: FilmSchoolRejects