Disney's live-action film "The Little Mermaid," starring a black actor, has been plagued by "star terror" around the world since its release last weekend.

On the 29th (local time), on Rotten Tomatoes, an American movie rating site, "The Little Mermaid" recorded a high level of 95% of the certified audience ratings that actually purchased tickets.

However, according to IMDB's international audience ratings, the film scored 10.6 out of 3 in the U.S., followed by 5.9 in the U.K., 5.8 in Brazil, 5.7 in Canada, and 6.3 in Mexico.

IMDB issued a warning on the film's ratings page and announced that "our scoring mechanism has detected unusual rating activity for this film" and that it has "applied an alternative weighting method to protect the reliability of the rating system."

While IMDB has not disclosed the specific calculation method, it is believed that it used methods such as eliminating repeated scoring by users who deliberately tried to lower the ratings of movies.

Warnings about excessively negative ratings also appeared on the French film site AlloCine, according to US entertainment outlet Deadline.

Deadline also highlighted the negative reactions on South Korea's Naver movie ratings page.

On the Naver rating page, there are many viewers who gave it 10 out of 1 with bad reviews such as "I can't get immersed in it".

The overall audience rating was 1.96 on the first day of the film's release and has now risen to 6.60.


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Globally, audience reactions have been mixed, but box office performances are cruising.

According to Box Office Mojo, a website that aggregates movie box office revenues, the film has grossed $26.1 million (about 1 billion won) worldwide, including $750.1 million (about 560 billion won) in ticket sales in the United States since its release on Dec. 1.

It is the fifth-highest box office record for a movie released during the Memorial Day holiday, which falls on the last Monday in May in the United States.

Earlier, the film was titled "Political Correctness" (Political Correctness· PC) sparked a "black washing" controversy when Disney cast black singer and actress Halley Bailey for the first time in the role of Ariel.

Blackwashing is a term used in comparison to "white washing," which is the practice of unconditionally hiring white actors in mainstream Hollywood and other Western films, and is a sarcastic expression for the trend of unconditionally featuring people of color, such as blacks, in films in pursuit of racial diversity.

In addition, there were reactions that the red crab "Sebastian" and the timid fish "Flounder", who were loved as existing animated characters in this live-action film, were realized in an overly realistic way, causing rejection.

(Photo = Courtesy of The Walt Disney Company Korea, Yonhap News)