The Little Mermaid remake is nearly an hour longer than the original — so what did Disney add?

polygon.com:

Disney’s new live-action The Little Mermaid, which hits theaters in May, runs two hours and 15 minutes long — almost an hour longer than the original. While some Disney remakes are simply shot-for-shot do-overs of the animated films, others take more creative liberties and use the original movies as a springboard more than anything. It’s a sliding scale of The Lion King (2019), which was unflinchingly faithful save for a 20-minute sequence involving a dung beetle pushing a ball of poop, to Mulan (2020) which only really kept the main character’s name and little else.

For the most part, the trailers for The Little Mermaid seem like it falls closer to The Lion King end of the spectrum, with shots highlighting the original movie’s most iconic moments. But there is that extra hour to account for. What in the deep blue sea could that extra hour entail?

As Polygon’sresident Disney expert (and direct-to-home video connoisseur), I am here to theorize about what could possibly fill this time.

The Little Mermaid has six other female characters, all with established relationships with one another, who barely get any screen time in the original. Giving them something to do — as well as turning them into decent and concerned sisters — would be the most obvious way to fill the time. In the original Hans Christian Andersen story, where the mermaids all get one chance to leave home and venture toward the surface, they all get a little moment of what they did during that time. Additionally, the direct-to-home video prequel, Ariel’s Beginning, gave all the sisters more personality and fleshed out their dynamics a smidge more.

Note, Ariel’s sisters in this new movie are not exact one-to-one versions of the animated counterparts. The