5 Reasons Why Disney's Live-Action Snow White Bombed At The Box Office

It was yet another disappointing weekend at the box office in 2025. We're coming off of a rough stretch in March that has seen movies misfire left and right, with "Novocaine" and "Black Bag" having recently led the worst weekend of the year so far. All eyes then turned to Disney to hopefully save the day with its live-action remake of "Snow White," which stars Rachel Zegler ("West Side Story") and Gal Gadot ("Wonder Woman"). Sorry to say, this was not like the Disney remakes of the 2010s that did gangbusters business. Rather, it's a full-blown bomb.

Director Marc Webb's "Snow White" opened to an estimated $43 million domestically, coming in well below projections that had it debuting in the $50 million range. To be clear, even that wouldn't have been great for a movie with a production budget north of $250 million. Disney needed this to be a smash hit. To make matters worse, the reimagining of the classic fairy tale also tanked overseas, pulling in just $44.3 million for an $87.3 million global start. That was well below the expected $100 million or so it was projected for heading into the weekend. Barring a miraculous turnaround like "Mufasa: The Lion King" ($35 million opening on its way to $718 million worldwide overall), this is going to be a disaster.

So, what went wrong here? Is Disney's remake machine running out of gas? Is there hope for a turnaround in the coming weeks? We're going to look at some of the biggest reasons why "Snow White" bombed at the box office in its debut. Let's get into it.

As is often the case, critics can have an impact on a given movie's performance. However, it is the audiences themselves who ultimately decide a movie's fate. In this case, critics were very soft on "Snow White" and viewers largely seemed to shrug it off with a response that could be best described as "meh." In the pandemic era, the bar for going to the movies for the average person needs to be much higher than "meh." None of the indicators we have currently suggest word of mouth is going to do this one any favors in the weeks to come.

The film currently carries a pretty terrible 44% approval rating from critics on Rotten Tomatoes. The audience score is better, sitting at 74%, but that's more of a "wait to stream" score at best. To that end, the remake earned a not-so-great B+ CinemaScore. $250 million movies really need 90% scores and A ratings to get by and build the type of buzz that can carry them for weeks on end. That's just not the case here. /Film's Witney Seibold wrote "Snow White" is "better than expected but still pretty dopey" in his review. Not exactly a glowing endorsement, much less a recipe for success.

This is not rocket science, but it's no less true: "Snow White" was way too damn expensive. This has been a growing issue in the industry for years now, but far too many franchise films and tentpole blockbusters are falling victim to out of control budgets. This was the latest case. The pandemic certainly didn't help, nor did the literal years of delays and significant reshoots. Mind you, filming originally wrapped on this one more than two years ago. Disney has been toying with it for some time behind the scenes. That all adds up and, in this case, resulted in a prohibitively big price tag.

Even a decade back when Disney's live-action "Cinderella" remake hit theaters in 2015, it did so with a budget of $95 million and looked incredible. It was also a big success, taking in $542 million worldwide. It certainly helped that critics were on that movie's side, but the relatively reasonable budget acted as something of an insurance policy. In this case, Disney probably would need a global haul conservatively in the $600 million range to break even. At this rate, it's not going to get anywhere near that number.

That's not to say that a lower budget would have suddenly raised this film's opening weekend numbers, but those numbers wouldn't have been so damning. At the box office, it's all relative. That relativity matters at moments like this.

There is always going to be some level of debate when it comes to online discourse impacting the real-world performance of a movie at the box office. However, in the case of "Snow White," the various controversies that sprang up around it certainly didn't help. This isn't the place to go over all of them in detail, but the casting of Rachel Zegler in the lead role was met with a downright toxic response from certain corners of the internet. That's just for starters. There's also the matter of Zegler and Gal Gadot's outspoken political views, which always makes for hot-button issues.

Elsewhere, Peter Dinklage was critical of the portrayal of the dwarfs in "Snow White," which didn't help either. Things got so loud at one point that in late 2023, rumors began to crop up that Disney was going to cancel the movie altogether. That wasn't true of course, but it just goes to show how prevalent all of this negativity was online. As a result, the press tour for the movie was somewhat muted, only select members of the press were invited to the premiere, and Disney seemed to know that it had a bit of a grenade on its hands. None of this helped when it came to effectively selling the movie to the masses.

Disney has made a great deal of money from similar live-action remakes of its animated classics over the last 15 years, beginning with Tim Burton's $1 billion hit "Alice in Wonderland." But what we've seen is that vintage classics, such as "Pinocchio" or "Dumbo," don't result in big success stories like '90s favorites such as "Aladdin" or "The Lion King" have. Jon Favreau's "The Lion King" made more than $1.6 billion and was one of the highest-grossing movies ever at the time. In the case of "Snow White," it's probably going to land much closer to "Dumbo" ($352 million).

Even the "Little Mermaid" remake opened to $118 million domestically over the four-day Memorial Day weekend in 2023. It finished with $569 million globally and was only not considered a major success because of its $250 million budget. In any event, it was another example of popular late '80s and '90s titles having cache with nostalgic audiences. Sure, 1937's "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" is an enduring hit for Disney, in addition to being a remarkably important part of cinema history. But that didn't automatically make it a good candidate for a remake, particularly when the resulting film wasn't a critical smash.

Disney isn't going to stop doing these remakes, but if it's going to tackle other titles from its golden age, the studio needs to hit things out of the park. A middling movie isn't going to cut it in these cases, whereas it might with something like "Aladdin" or "Mufasa." 

Looking at the bigger picture, Disney is facing an issue that goes beyond a single movie — as is Hollywood at large. "Snow White" faced virtually no competition, as Robert De Niro's crime flick "The Alto Knights" absolutely tanked in its debut. This movie also had a completely clear runway to do business both domestically and abroad. Yet, it couldn't even clear $50 million in North America. That's a huge problem, and it all comes back to the idea that audience habits have changed dramatically over the last handful of years.

Five years ago, the pandemic forced theaters all around the world to close. The recovery has been slower than anyone expected and thanks to the advent of VOD, the rise of streaming, and 4K TVs being cheap, among other things, we may never reach pre-pandemic levels of box office again. Case in point, 2025's box office is already trailing 2024 at this same juncture, which was itself trailing well behind 2023. We're headed in the wrong direction and movies that once seemed like sure bets are no longer automatic hits. There are no easy answers but "Snow White" is, for the moment, at the center of a much larger issue; that much is certain.

"Snow White" is in theaters now.