- Snow White‘s domestic box office was a middling $43 million, well below initial projections due to a generally poor critical reception and ‘Seven Kajillion Controversies’ that mired the live-action musical remake.
Disney’s Snow White failed to hit expectations on its premiere weekend, weighed down by controversy over the live-action musical loosely based on a film that catapulted Disney to success.
Instead of standing the test of time and serving as a worthy successor to the original, Snow White has suffered from a backlash over its creative decisions reimagining a nearly 100-year-old animated feature whose legacy and historical significance it inherits.
The $250 million film hauled in a disappointing $43 million at the domestic box office, far below recent projections of at least $65 million amid generally middling reviews.
Both its critical and commercial reception currently rank it the lowest among any of Disney’s modern remakes of its animated classics. Even 2019’s Dumbo performed better with nearly $46 million on its opening weekend and a slightly better review score on aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes.
That opening nonetheless was sufficient to secure top place, with Black Bag coming in second with just a tenth of Snow White‘s take. Execs will no doubt hope that its international receipts can save the day, much like with Mufasa, where overseas ticket sales accounted for two-thirds of the overall respectable $718 million take.
Disney did not reply to a Fortune request for comment by press time.
The advent of streaming and home cinema paired with the soaring cost of going to the movie theater have clamped down on ticket sales in general. But the arrival of a new Disney picture for the whole family—let alone one upon which it built its reputation as a full-length film studio—should have been a recipe for minting money.
Instead the premier, carried out with little fanfare, felt more like Disney avoiding attention after what the New York Timescalled “Snow White and the Seven Kajillion Controversies”.
Non-stop PR nightmare for Disney execs
First there was the issue of how to treat the once titular dwarves. Peter Dinklage from Game of Thrones fame sparked a public feud with fellow short-statured actor Dylan Postl over whether it was culturally insensitive to use real actors born with dwarfism.
Briefly there was speculation they would simply be a bit more bohemian—the “seven Seattle baristas” as one critic put it—until finally the decision was taken to simply resort to CGI in an manner that seemed to pleased no one. Even the reference to the Seven Dwarves was stripped from the movie’s official title.
Then there was the casting of Rachel Zegler in the lead role, who has proven to be a PR headache for corporate execs. She rarely hid her criticism of the 1937 film that put Disney on the map. For example, she revealed being actually “scared of the original cartoon” as a child, while also slamming it for featuring a dated love story around a prince “who literally stalks” Snow White.
Just six months before the debut of what should be the actor’s biggest role on the silver screen to date, she drew heavy criticism immediately following the November election. In a social media post, she wished Trump voters “may never know peace” for their role in ushering in “another four years of hatred”. She issued a formal apology later, claiming emotions got the better of her.
Finally there was the personal friction between the two main leads. Israeli actress Gal Gadot is an ardent supporter of her country’s war against Hamas militants. Zegler by comparison has vociferously opposed the killing of Palestinian non-combatants, including the more than 14,500 children who have died according to UNICEF estimates.
Live-action remakes often panned as soulless cash grabs
The 1937 animation classic, based on the original Grimm fairy tale, was Disney’s first full-length animated film. It it was so influential in the creation of the company that its corporate headquarters in Burbank feature it in their architecture: the seven dwarves literally serve as carved columns supporting the Greek pediment that crowns the red sandstone building.
Since then, Disney has gone on to become a powerhouse of the entertainment industry, reaching its zeitgeist zenith as an animation studio in the 1990s with musicals from Howard Ashman and Alan Menken like Beauty and the Beast, the first animated film ever nominated as Best Picture.
Since then Disney yielded the scepter to Pixar, the computer-animated studio it acquired that went on to overshadow its own legacy business. It has been heavily criticized for its attempts to rehash many of its animated films into soulless live-action retellings, including so-far unrealized plans for a photo-realistic version of Bambi.
Some bemoan the adaptation of such classics into versions updated for “modern audiences”, others for draining away all the expressiveness of beloved characters like Little Mermaid’s Flounder and Lion King’s Simba, while others simply see them as a cynical cash grab inferior in all ways to their original.
It’s not just Disney getting heat for this, either, as Dreamworks faces similar criticism for its upcoming remake of 2010’s How to Train Your Dragon.
