Disney’s Snow White Flops Harder Than Ever Before

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Summary

  • Snow White is Disney’s lowest-grossing princess film, dropping significantly each weekend.
  • The movie’s unconventional choices like CGI dwarfs and modernized heroine led to poor reception.
  • Snow White might struggle to reach $100 million in the U.S., facing significant losses for Disney.

Despite Snow White’s fair reputation, her latest film has faced numerous challenges even prior to its release, ultimately falling short in box office success once it hit theaters. Currently, three weekends into its run, the movie is facing greater difficulties than ever before and seems poised to join Disney’s list of most significant commercial flops.

The upcoming film, titled “Snow White,” is Disney’s latest live-action remake based on their classic 1937 animation of the same name. In this version, Rachel Zegler takes on the role of Snow White, Gal Gadot portrays the Evil Queen, and Andrew Burnap plays a character resembling Prince Charming. However, the film’s production faced challenges when some of Zegler’s comments about modernizing her character during a press tour became widely discussed online. Fans of the original were not pleased with her idea to transform Disney’s princess into a heroine without Prince Charming. Moreover, the decision to incorporate CGI dwarfs instead of real actors stirred controversy among fans and has potentially affected the movie’s commercial success.

Snow White Is in Box Office Freefall and the Lowest Grossing Disney Princess

A -58% Drop on Weekend 3 Is Unprecedented for a Disney Remake

The opening weekend earnings for Snow White totaled $42.2 million in the U.S., and an additional $44 million over its first three days. However, its second weekend saw a disappointing decline of $14.2 million at the box office, which was much more than expected, even surpassing Maleficent 2’s drop. According to Box Office Mojo and confirmed by box office analyst Luiz Fernando on X, Snow White earned only $6.1 million in its third weekend in North America, having lost around 450 theaters on Friday. This represents a significant -56% decrease from its previous weekend, making it the film with the lowest third-weekend drop among live-action Disney princesses to date.

To provide some context, the sequel to “Maleficent” saw a decrease of 32% during its second weekend, ending with a domestic total of $113 million and a global take of $491 million. Similarly, “Cruella”, “Dumbo”, and “Jungle Cruise” experienced losses of 38%, 48%, and 42% respectively. As we speak, the recent release of “Snow White” has accumulated $77 million in North America and $90.9 million across 53 international markets, amounting to a combined total of $168 million. Interestingly, the original film “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” garnered $418 million over multiple re-releases.

Unfavorable critiques, such as a B+ on CinemaScore and 40% on Rotten Tomatoes, are far from reassuring, and widespread discontent among the public over perceived disregard for her character by Zegler has cast a shadow on the Disney live-action remake. Analysts foresee challenges for this production to surpass $100 million in the U.S., worsened when compared to the impressive opening of A Minecraft Movie, which seems to be draining any remaining momentum that Snow White previously had.

The expensive production cost of $250 million for “Snow White” is predicted to lead to a loss of at least $115 million for Disney, according to some estimates. This financial forecast has allegedly made Disney executives hesitant about quickly producing a live-action version of “Tangled”, with the project even rumored to have been canceled. As things stand now, “Snow White” needs only around $20 million more to surpass the earnings of the 2000 film “102 Dalmatians” and about $30 million to outperform the 2018 film “Christopher Robin”. If it achieves these milestones, it would avoid being labeled as Disney’s lowest-grossing non-pandemic-era remake. However, this is a very low benchmark compared to its initial expectations when it was first announced as one of the most anticipated movies of the year.

Sources: Box Office Mojo, Luiz Fernando/X

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2025-04-07 21:45