Disney’s ‘Snow White’ Has a Sleepy Box Office Start
Disney’s latest remake, “Snow White,” arrived in theaters on Thursday night as one of the most snakebit projects in the company’s 102-year history. Almost everything that could go wrong did, resulting in a torrent of negative prerelease publicity.
Did the tumult have an impact on the box office?
It certainly didn’t help: Based on projections from analysts, “Snow White” will finish the weekend with a saggy $45 million in ticket sales. In the 15 years that Disney has been producing live-action remakes of its animated classics, none of the big-budget entries have arrived in theaters to less than $58 million, after adjusting for inflation. (That was “Dumbo” in 2019.)
“Snow White” collected an additional $44 million or so overseas this weekend, according to Disney. The movie cost at least $350 million to make and market (on par with “Dumbo” after adjusting for inflation).
Despite its slow start, “Snow White” was the No. 1 movie in the United States and Canada over the weekend, according to Comscore, which compiles box office data. It played in 4,200 theaters and gave the struggling movie theater business its second-biggest opening of the year, behind Disney’s “Captain America: Brave New World,” which had $89 million in first-weekend ticket sales.
Among other new releases, the gangster drama “The Alto Knights” (Warner Bros.), which cost roughly $50 million to make, excluding marketing, collected a disastrous $3 million from 2,651 theaters. It received weak reviews.
“Magazine Dreams” (Briarcliff), a gritty bodybuilder drama starring Jonathan Majors, took in about $700,000 from 815 theaters, a result that The Hollywood Reporter called “D.O.A.” Mr. Majors had promoted the film as a comeback vehicle after his career took a hit when he was convicted in 2023 of assaulting and harassing an ex-girlfriend. Reviews were mostly positive.
“Snow White” divided critics and audiences. Reviews were only 43 percent positive, according to Rotten Tomatoes, the review-aggregation site. Among moviegoers, however, “Snow White” did much better: The Rotten Tomatoes “audience score” was 74 percent positive on Sunday.
Latinos made up 30 percent of the audience, which was 72 percent female, according to Disney.
Based on the 1937 animated classic “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” Disney’s film ran into one problem after another after starting production in 2021. The coronavirus pandemic, the 2023 actors’ strike and extensive reshoots resulted in budget overruns. Disney was criticized by members of the dwarf community for creative decisions involving Grumpy, Bashful, Doc and the gang.
And the film’s outspoken star, Rachel Zegler, who is Latina, became a lightning rod. Internet users (mostly men) and some right-wing media outlets criticized her casting, contending that an actress of Colombian descent had no business playing Snow White, and that Disney’s support of her was an example of Hollywood diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives run amok.
Some of those “go woke, go broke” faultfinders took a victory lap online over the weekend.
But analysts pushed back on that theory, saying “Snow White” also struggled at the box office because the underlying intellectual property was old-fashioned. At this point, Disney has remade most of its more recent animated classics and has been forced to move on to second-tier properties in its library, including “Lilo & Stitch.” Its live-action version arrives in theaters in May.
Audiences have also started to tire of live-action remakes of animated movies in general, according to analysts, who cite declining returns at the box office. Disney is aware of this trend and has shelved plans to redo “Bambi” (1942), “The Sword in the Stone” (1963), “Hercules” (1997) and others. (Disney, however, is still working on a live-action “Tangled,” a 2010 animated movie about the Rapunzel story.)
For its part, Universal has a lot riding on its coming live-action remake of the 2010 animated film “How to Train Your Dragon.”
When movies arrive to disappointing ticket sales, studios always say they are hopeful that word of mouth will lead to a wider audience in the following weeks. In the case of “Snow White,” it may not (just) be spin.
“The success of the film will depend on whether it gets the ‘babysitter effect’” — parents looking for ways to occupy young children — “and plays well for a couple of months like ‘Mufasa’ recently did,” David A. Gross, a box office analyst, said in an email on Saturday. “Disney knows how to support their films, and this corridor, which includes spring breaks, is a good one.”
