Well, so much for that. Perhaps we should have seen this coming as it has been more than a year since Sofia Coppola boarded Universal's live-action The Little Mermaid, and next to nothing has been heard about it. Now we have a better idea why, as Deadline reports Coppola has exited the film due to, you guessed it, "creative differences".
This would have been a step towards the mainstream unlike anything we've seen from Coppola, which may be part of the reason why they she and the studio couldn't see eye-to-eye. Universal plans to move forward on it with Caroline Thompson (Edward Scissorhands) giving the script a rewrite after Abi Morgan (Shame) and Kelly Marcel (Fifty Shades of Grey) wrote previous versions.
Before Coppola it was Joe Wright (Atonement) who had been attached to direct, and maybe now we'll see Universal steer clear of such unconventional choices. It doesn't seem to have worked out thus far.
