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

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.