Quoted By:
Yes.
From what I've been, the online backlash from this has been very small. But obviously some people somewhere are going to complain about it in stupid ways, especially on sites like Twitter or Facebook, which gives every idiot a platform to voice their opinions - not to mention places like here, where you can get away with saying pretty much anything. Companies (Disney especially) know this and capitalize on it all the time with their marketing: useful idiots/paid employees on sites like Reddit will look for these racist comments, then it gets pushed to the top of their sites so people can shame the racists/virtual signal/feel better about themselves/get internet points. This creates the false image that this backlash is indicative of a significant trend/movement, so instead of "a handful of racists are (surprise surprise) racist", it becomes "white people/incels/Trump supporters are leading a racist movement against people of color", which gets people incensed and Disney uses to sell tickets.
For the record, I don't have a problem with them taking The Little Mermaid and re-contextualizing it to taking place in the Carribean and casting accordingly - it's like how you can take Shakespeare and move his stories to different settings, because there's a universal truth to the narrative and you can move it anywhere and it'll work. Hopefully they take advantage of the difference in setting to do something unique - I don't think they will though, because that involves risk. Yes, if it was an African story recast with white actors, the people advocating for it would be livid. Yes, it's part of a trend of taking proven European stories and just making the characters black, rather than taking stories that draw from African mythology. Yes, it's another soulless cashgrab that's being made because Hollywood is creatively bankrupt. But it really doesn't matter. This won't supersede the original movie, and if it's anything like Aladdin, will be forgotten about after a week.
