12 Years Later, Sofia Coppola's Unmade Epic Fantasy Still Lives Rent Free in My Head

Oct 31, 2026 - 17:14

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12 Years Later, Sofia Coppola's Unmade Epic Fantasy Still Lives Rent Free in My Head

Published Oct 31, 2026, 8:00 AM EDT

Coppola's scrapped The Little Mermaid would adapt Hans Christian Andersen's true fairy tale

The year was 2014. 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.

The Little Mermaid, a timeline

Ariel the mermaid smirks at a rather nervous-looking Sebastian the crab in Disney’s animated 1989 feature The 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.

By June 2015, Coppola had left the project due to creative differences. Chloë Grace Moretz was cast in the lead, and Rebecca Thomas was in talks to direct. A year later, Moretz left the project, and nothing else was heard.

What could have been

Priscilla Presley (Cailee Spaeny, in a white wedding dress and swept-back white veil), stands with Elvis Presley (Jacob Elordi, in a black tuxedo) stand behind their tiered white wedding cake under an arch of green leaves and white flowers, with Elvis looking downward and Priscilla looking directly into the camera, in Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla

Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid is one of the most infamous fairy tales of all time, primarily because of its brutally dark ending. Not only does the little mermaid die, but the prince happily marries someone else. A closer read of the tale, however, reveals there’s far more going on. There’s plenty in the story that feels like perfect material for Coppola’s sensibilities as a filmmaker.

Andersen’s mermaid sisters play a key role in the fairy tale, reappearing at the end to rescue their little sister from the human world in grim fashion. They’ve cut off their hair and traded it to the sea witch for a knife. They give the knife to the little mermaid so she can kill the prince and dip her feet in his blood, a trick that would transform her back into a mermaid. (See, it's a story about sisterhood — and also murder.)

Except the little mermaid decides she can’t kill the prince because she loves him, so she throws the knife into the sea and jumps in after it, transforming into sea foam but also a “daughter of the air” (a redemptive conclusion in fairy-tale speak). She becomes a free creature and gets a shot at an immortal soul — something that mermaids don’t have, and one of the main reasons she wanted to become human in the first place.

A story about the daughter of a king who feels like a stranger in her own palace? Coppola, scion of Hollywood royalty, has made that movie half a dozen times. A girl who gives up her identity to live in man’s world, adored but never seen? See Marie Antoinette or Priscilla. In other words, the blueprint for another Sophia Coppola banger is right there on the page, waiting to be adapted in her signature cinematic style.

Why Sofia Coppola's Little Mermaid movie never happened

Halle Bailey as Ariel singing atop a rock with a sunrise in the backdrop in The Little Mermaid.

Coppola addressed her scrapped project in 2017. “I thought it would be fun to do a fairy tale,” she said at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. “I’ve always loved fairy tales, so I was curious about doing that.” The only problem was the project’s scale. “I wanted to shoot it really underwater, which would have been a nightmare. But underwater photography is so beautiful. We even did some tests."

In 2023, she further revealed that the business side of handling a movie with such a large budget didn’t align with her interests as a filmmaker. “I was in a boardroom and some development guy said, ‘What’s gonna get the 35-year-old man in the audience?’ And I just didn’t know what to say,” she told Rolling Stone. “I just was not in my element.”

In recent years, Coppola has released films across various genres, from Southern Gothic to family dramas. Still, she’s called leaving The Little Mermaid her “most agonizing career decision.” Now that her project with Kirsten Dunst has been scrapped because she deemed it "too sad," perhaps it’s time to take another stab at The Little Mermaid. Something just as heartbreaking but also freaky, surreal, and wholly escapist? Please?