The live-action Disney remake craze had already begun thanks to the success of Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, but it hadn’t reached its box office peak. Meanwhile, on the other side of Hollywood, Sofia Coppola was attached to a movie bursting at the seams with possibilities: a live-action The Little Mermaid, not based on the 1998 Disney animated classic, but on the original Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, where (spoiler alert) the brokenhearted mermaid dies by flinging herself into the ocean and dissolving into sea foam. I can picture Coppola’s compositions clearly in my mind: the mermaid (Elle Fanning) shot in pastel colors, thoughtfully looking out at the horizon.
A song by The Strokes or Phoenix plays in the background. Coppola never actually made her The Little Mermaid, but it’s a project that has lingered in some of her fans’ minds (me). While Coppola mostly works in realism, there’s a hazy and dreamlike quality to her films.
Who can forget the tragic Lisbon sisters from The Virgin Suicides, or that shot of the lilac Converse sneakers in Marie Antoinette? We never got that movie, though Disney released its own sanitized live-action remake in 2023 to muted reviews. Still, Coppola’s unmade version remains one of modern Hollywood’s great what-ifs, and one that could get a happy ending, even if Andersen never gave one to his little mermaid.
Deadline published the first exclusive I can find connecting Coppola to The Little Mermaid in 2014. Caroline Thompson, the screenwriter of Edward Scissorhands (!!!) was attached to rewrite a screenplay that had been in the works for some time, passing through writers like Kelly Marcel (Fifty Shades of Grey) and Abi Morgan (Shame). A glance at that list shows that the film’s tone was already all over the place.
Before Coppola landed the project, Joe Wright was attached to direct. He’d just come off Anna Karenina and some perfume commercials, and wanted to direct a kids' movie next. (He ultimately did with Pan, which came out in 2015.) Then came the casting drama. In an interview with The Telegraph, Coppola revealed she’d lined up a pre-breakthrough Maya Hawke for the lead.
Universal reportedly balked at the idea of having an unknown star as the center of its next big-budget movie. In a 2019 BuzzFeed puppy interview, Hawke said that she “really wanted” the part of The Little Mermaid, which people took to mean Disney’s 2023 adaptation. Maybe she auditioned for both; you'll have to ask her.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
