After years of delays and online vitriol, Disney is finally set to release its remake of “Snow White,” and it’s going to take a lot to keep it from becoming one of the biggest flops in the studio’s now decade-old remake series.
With a reported production budget said to be at least $250 million, “Snow White” is tracking for a domestic opening of $45-50 million and a global opening of around $100 million. For comparison, the domestic range is similar to the $45.9 million launch of Tim Burton’s 2019 remake of “Dumbo,” which went on to gross a disappointing $353 million worldwide against a $170 million budget before marketing.
That leaves “Snow White” in a situation where it will need an unexpected, multiweek comeback akin to what “Mufasa” achieved this past winter just to break even. Like “Mufasa,” it’s not going to get help from critics, who are tepid on the film outside of its lead star Rachel Zegler with a 45% Rotten Tomatoes score from early reviews.
Much will be written about how the online culture wars surrounding the film — from Zegler’s criticisms of the original 1937 “Snow White” to the opposing stances she and co-star Gal Gadot have on the recently resumed Israel-Hamas war — played a role in the film getting to this point financially.
But that is all secondary to the bigger issue, which is that the wider audience that isn’t engaged on these controversies simply isn’t interested in what “Snow White” is selling in its promotional material. While much of its focus has been on Zegler’s singing and Gadot’s villainous performance the Evil Queen, the marketing has downplayed the seven CGI dwarves, which were negatively received when the first trailer was released in December.
“Moms and daughters are not online talking about the movie in YouTube comment sections. That’s not where this film’s core audience lives,” Fandango analytics director Shawn Robbins said.
It’s also worth considering that there simply isn’t as much of an appetite for a remake of “Snow White” as there is for other animated Disney films. It has been 15 years since Tim Burton planted the seed of the remake series with his 2010 take on “Alice in Wonderland,” which was followed in 2014 by a reimagining of “Sleeping Beauty” with Angelina Jolie’s “Maleficent” and the 2015 remake of “Cinderella.”
Those early films set the foundation for the remake series by promising moviegoers a take on the most well-known titles of the classic Disney canon that they’ve never seen before, a formula taken to new heights when the comparatively less popular “The Jungle Book” was turned into a $1 billion hit remake with the draw of its state-of-the-art CGI. More ten-digit totals followed with the pivot to remakes of Disney Renaissance films like “Beauty and the Beast,” “The Lion King” and “Aladdin.”
But as the mixed results of the 2023 remake of “The Little Mermaid” showed, the remake series isn’t as reliable as it once was, and the core draws of future installments need to be more effective.
That’s difficult with source material like “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” a film that, while forever holding a hallowed place in film history as the first animated feature in 1937, doesn’t have the same kind of lasting cultural power as later films Walt Disney oversaw like “Cinderella” and “Sleeping Beauty,” two films whose very titles are still part of conversational language. How many parents have told their kids, “Wake up, Sleeping Beauty” when it’s time to go to school? How often will college basketball fans talk about underdog teams going on a “Cinderella run” during March Madness this weekend?
“Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” may have received VHS play for a lot of people during their childhood, but it could be argued that their best source of lasting cultural power comes from the dwarves and their song “Heigh Ho.” Again, “Snow White” can’t sell those dwarves because of the initial poor reaction, and will need strong word-of-mouth from early family ticket buyers to turn that around.
For comparison, look at the early buzz for Disney’s other 2025 remake, “Lilo & Stitch.” In a complete 180 from “Snow White,” Disney has made the faithful CGI recreation of Stitch the sole aspect of its early marketing for the film, and it was only last week that fans got to see other characters — including Maia Kealoha as Lilo — in the first full trailer.
That marketing strategy, combined with the stronger appeal of “Lilo & Stitch” as a film that millennials saw in theaters growing up and which they can now share with their kids, paid off with 158 million trailer views in the first 24 hours of release. That’s second only to “The Lion King” among all of Disney’s remakes, and sets up for the film to be part of what could be a big summer for the studio with Marvel’s “Thunderbolts” and “Fantastic 4: First Steps,” along with Pixar’s “Elio.”
After those films, Disney will likely have a huge holiday season with Thanksgiving’s ‘Zootopia 2,” which could join its 2016 predecessor in the $1 billion club, and James Cameron’s “Avatar: Fire and Ash,” which could make the sci-fi series into the first in history to have three installments gross $2 billion-plus. In short, there’s plenty of opportunity for Disney to rebound if “Snow White” doesn’t work out.
So what will it take for this remake to work out? The one way out for “Snow White” is sustained positive buzz from the core family audience, along perhaps with some element of the film going viral on social media to counterbalance the online controversies.
That was what helped fuel “Mufasa” — along with that film’s CGI splendor — throughout this past holiday season, riding off the TikTok popularity of star Aaron Pierre and the film’s song “I Always Wanted a Brother” to a $252 million domestic, $716 million global theatrical run despite lukewarm critical reviews and competition from “Sonic the Hedgehog 3.”
“Snow White” will face similar video game competition in the form of Warner Bros.’ “A Minecraft Movie” starting in its third weekend on April 4, so building that audience buzz quickly is the only way to a happily ever after.
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