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Halle Bailey
Disney’s The Little Mermaid dominated the Memorial Day Weekend box office, earning $118 million over the last several days.
The live-action film — which stars Halle Bailey, Melissa McCarthy, and Awkwafina and was directed by Rob Marshall — takes place largely underwater, with stunning coastal backdrops. Though much of the film was brought to life with CGI, many of those backdrops were shot on location and are real.
Here’s a guide to where the new version of The Little Mermaid was filmed.
Where was The Little Mermaid filmed?
Most of the coastal scenes featured in The Little Mermaid were shot on the Italian island of Sardinia, located in the Mediterranean sea. Variety reported that much of the filming took place in the seaside village of Santa Teresa di Gallura, on the island’s northern coast, and production took place there during the summer of 2021.
Other Sardinian locations that appear are the town of Castelsardo, where Prince Eric’s castle is located, and Spiaggia di Rena Majore in Aglientu, the beach where Ariel rescues Eric. The towns of Rena di Metteu and Cala Moresca are also featured in the film.
The location shoots made up only a small portion of the filming though,and the rest of The Little Mermaid was filmed at Pinewood Studios, located outside of London, England. Pinewood has been used by Disney (and Marvel) for years to film movies like Disenchanted and Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania.
But Pinewood’s claim to fame are their indoor and outdoor water stages, and that’s where much of The Little Mermaid was filmed. According to a recent tweet from Pinewood Studios, eight of their other studios were also used to provide backdrops for the film.
Though much of the film takes place in the water, many of the underwater sequences were filmed with actors rigged into harnesses that hung in the air, and CGI was later applied to give the effect of being underwater.
“Every single day I would either be up in the air on wires or I would be in the water,” Bailey said in a YouTube video where she described the filming process back in 2022.
She added, “The times when I would be underwater it was crazy. I was in a huge water tank and a wave machine that would go. I can’t wait until you guys actually see it so you’ll know what I’m talking about, but it felt like I was in the middle of the ocean.”
The Little Mermaid is in theaters now. Here’s how you can stream The Little Mermaid.
