Why Kids' Movies are the Biggest Summer Blockbusters Now

+ a spoiler-free investigation

I am still basking in the haze of my five days at Palm Beach, a balminess unconquerable even by a daily commute to Times Square. This is proof either of the power of rest or my personal susceptibility to the dark thrall of a red state. I’ve had trouble focusing on anything filmwise as a result of my twice-over Margaritaville attitude and the new Zelda game, but thankfully the big movies right now are children’s movies—two+ hour long PG slogs perfect for my underripe brain. 

Local woman asks: “why are there so many kids at this kids’ movie”

“Who is this for” is the most inane question one can ask of a big studio movie. “It’s for the money” is the obvious, Draper-ish answer. But the massive openings of both Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse and The Little Mermaid prove that there is more than one way to successfully milk the nostalgia cow. Having recently rewatched the 1989 animated The Little Mermaid for my piece about cinematic mermaid sisters in Bright Wall, Dark Room, I found myself spending most of the movie waiting, mentally running through a checklist of every scene I knew would happen. And not just the major setpieces like the big musical numbers, but the insignificant moments only a child or multibillion dollar corporation could memorialize, like Ariel telling Flounder not to be such a guppy.

The joy of the adaptation is in the disruption of expectation. This is why Into the Spider-Verse (2018) and Miles Morales were so thrilling to audiences, even though it felt like the five hundredth Spider-Man movie in ten years. Even laymen know what comes “with great power,” but the first Spider-Verse remixed the lore. It’s like Fat Ham, the recent Pulitzer-winning adaptation of Hamlet, not including the “to be or not to be” monologue. Look at Titus Burgess’s gloating, frenzied version of “Poor Unfortunate Souls,” and the disarming departures from the original. He mouths the lyric, “just your voice,” because he knows the audience will sing it in their head. You already know this part. Let’s keep it moving.

He also goes all in on canonical line, “body language, HA” which is cut from the 2023 version

Adaptations are also a way to consolidate an empire, to further canonize Disney stories, and to eventually create more stuff to sell. I am sure there is a desk at Disney HQ with pitch decks for each of Ariel’s racially diverse sisters and their accompanying LEGO set. The near identicality of The Little Mermaid remake to the animated version does not replace the animation—in fact it does the opposite. Remaking it in gooey, gormless live action, with a few superficial lyric changes, cements the original as flawless. Why gild the lilypad, if you will. And it’s why The Little Mermaid feels empty and mostly vibeless.

This empire also caters to some of the most rabid fan bases in Disney adults and Marvel fanboys. These groups are maligned not necessarily for their harmfulness but for their complete aversion to any reasonable sense of good taste. With each of these adaptations (and there have been Broadway musicals of both The Little Mermaid and Spider-Man), their childhood interests, whether comic books or animated movies, are deified as serious works of art and major media touchstones.

Automatic fail for the “let people enjoy things” crowd. This is a real Airbnb.

Reactions to these movies also show the social issues that children’s movies are expected to address. The criticism of Mermaid has been wide-ranging, to say the least, and the movie’s colorblind interpretation of a quasi-19th century island principality ruled by a Black queen and her white, English son certainly invites geopolitical questions that are obviously unaddressed. Because while Halle Bailey is uppercase B-Black, Ariel is not. She’s another princess in Disney’s long line of consumable products, one who will be replicated in children’s party hats and age-appropriate Halloween costumes. It’s frustrating but expected that a kids’ movie with some pretty obvious themes of girlhood vulnerability, toxic body image, and the silencing weight of paternal expectations has zero interest in investigating them.

Especially because Across the Spider-Verse shows that it is still possible for a children’s movie to be thoughtful. It also shows how good a movie can look when people have time to make it, which I can’t say for the malformed CGI of The Little Mermaid. Miles is not a race-bent Peter Parker. He’s dealing with a whole different set of recognizable and grounded feelings that tie into his specific identity and location—the pain of loneliness, the difficulty of adolescence, the struggle to reconcile your support of BLM with your cop dad (okay, that one isn’t explored). 

Come on this looks like a Taylor Swift video

Across comments on our desire to obsess about our heroes while also laying the groundwork to profit off that obsession, as proven by whatever inevitable hideous collection of FunkoPops is already for sale at your local Barnes & Noble. The Spider-Verse itself is a meta riff on the idea of an expanded universe, with each Spider-Person enjoying some cross-media notoriety in their own world, whether it be television show appearances or Christmas albums. The brief inclusion of some live-action footage seems to be there purely to tie the entire franchise together and remind you that hey, if you liked this Spider-Man, check out all our other ones, because we’ve been making them for years. 

Ultimately my question is not who these movies are for but whether they’re even movies. Are they meant to be consumed the way one consumes a movie, or does this just happen to be the end result of mercenary financial strategy? If I learned anything from trying to finish a single episode of Succession (I’m on season two, no spoilers), it’s that the thing you’re selling doesn’t actually matter. What matters is that it sells. Halle Bailey as the Little Mermaid and Miles Morales as Spider-Man just happened to find the most cost effective return on investment this time around (and we’ll see how The Little Mermaid fares overseas as we are once again reminded that Blackness is ultra-marketable as long as no one has to actually see us). And even though I liked Across the Spider-Verse a lot more—I loved it—I am not delusional enough to think any Disney movie can, or wants to, fundamentally challenge the social structure it’s profited on or helped create. 

Reagan jumpscare/footage of capitalism congratulating itself

I know that there will be a live action Miles Morales movie and there will probably be colorist casting decisions and some ensuing racist commentary from a B-list Christian who was in a Spider-Man video game twenty years ago while Disney does a victory lap. A movie cannot both make a billion dollars and end white supremacy, no matter how many personal essays titled “what [major studio character] means to my [marginalized identity]” are clicked on. Social change is not a useful calculation for shareholders. That’s what the money is for.