Disney’s Snow White has a sleepy start with $60m at box office

LOS ANGELES – Disney’s latest remake, Snow White, arrived in cinemas on March 20 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 pre-release publicity.

Did the tumult have an impact on the box office? It certainly did not help. Based on projections from analysts, Snow White will finish the weekend with a saggy US$45 million (S$60 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 has arrived in cinemas to less than US$58 million, after adjusting for inflation. That was Dumbo in 2019.

Snow White collected an additional US$44 million or so overseas over the weekend, according to Disney. The movie cost at least US$350 million to make and market – on a 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 cinemas and gave the struggling movie theatre business its second-biggest opening of the year, behind Disney’s Captain America: Brave New World, which had US$89 million in first-weekend ticket sales.

Among other new releases, the gangster drama The Alto Knights – starring American actor Robert De Niro in dual roles, and which cost roughly US$50 million to make, excluding marketing – collected a disastrous US$3 million from 2,651 cinemas. It received weak reviews.

Magazine Dreams, a gritty bodybuilder drama starring American actor Jonathan Majors, took in about US$700,000 from 815 cinemas, a result that The Hollywood Reporter called “DOA (dead on arrival)”. 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 per cent positive, according to review-aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes. Among moviegoers, however, Snow White did much better – the Rotten Tomatoes’ “audience score” was 74 per cent positive on March 23.

Latinos made up 30 per cent of the audience, which was 72 per cent 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 Covid-19 pandemic, the 2023 actors strike and extensive reshoots resulted in budget overruns. Disney was criticised 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 criticised her casting, 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” fault-finders took a victory lap online over the weekend.

But analysts said 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 (2002). Its live-action version arrives in cinemas 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. It is, however, 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 (2024) recently did”, Mr David Gross, a box-office analyst, said in an e-mail on March 22. “Disney knows how to support their films, and this corridor, which includes spring breaks, is a good one.” NYTIMES