There’s More Bad News For Disney’s Live Action Snow White

Snow White may be fair, but her latest movie has been battling uphill long before its cinematic debut, grossly underperforming once on worldwide screens. Three weekends in, it’s in more trouble than ever before and about to become one of Disney’s biggest misfires commercially.

Snow White is Disney’s latest live-action adaptation of its classic animations, this time of the 1937 animation of the same name. It stars Rachel Zegler as the titular princess, Gal Gadot as the Evil Queen, and Andrew Burnap as Snow White’s love interest — a Prince Charming of some sort. The movie’s troubling times began when Zegler’s comments about the character at a press tour went viral. Her desire to modernize the Disney princess into a heroine devoid of Prince Charming didn’t sit well with lovers of the original. Disney’s decision to include CGI-ed dwarfs — seen by some as the true heart of the films — instead of casting real actors further angered fans and doomed the movie’s commercial prospects.

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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

Snow White’s opening weekend was already disappointing when it posted $42.2 million domestically and $44 million in its first three days. The movie’s second weekend only gobbled up $14.2 million at the U.S. box office — an unprecedented -66% drop for a Disney live-action, surpassing Maleficent 2’s -46%. According to Box Office Mojo and corroborated by box office analyst Luiz Fernando on X, Snow White’s third weekend grossed just $6.1 million in the North American market after losing 450 theaters on Friday — plummeting -56% from the previous weekend. With these numbers, it’s once again the lowest third-weekend drop among live-action Disney princesses.

For reference, Maleficent 2 dropped -32% in its second weekend, eventually bowing with $113 million domestic and $491 million global; Cruella lost -38%; Dumbo, -48%; and Jungle Cruise -42%. As of this writing, Snow White has garnered $77 million in North America and $90.9 million in 53 overseas markets for an allied cume of $168 million. The original Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs earned $418 million over the course of its several re-releases.

Devastating reviews — a B+ on CinemaScore and 40% on Rotten Tomatoes are anything but encouraging — and widespread dissatisfaction among the general audience with Zegler’s supposed disrespect for her character has led to a Disney live-action remake that analysts predict would struggle to cross $100 million in the United States. It becomes more compounded when one considers the insane box office debut of A Minecraft Movie, which is already sucking any remaining steam that Snow White had left in its tanks.

Snow White’s hefty $250 million price tag means that the movie would set Disney at least $115 million in losses by some estimates. This commercial outlook has reportedly discouraged Disney executives from fast-tracking a Tangled live-action movie, with the project already reportedly canned. As it stands, Snow White needs less than $20 million to beat 2000’s 102 Dalmatians and $30 million to edge past 2018’s Christopher Robin a benchmark that would spare it the title of lowest-grossing non-pandemic-era Disney remake. It probably will, but that’s an extremely low bar for what was once positioned as one of the most anticipated movies of the year when it was first announced.

Snow White

Release Date

March 21, 2025

Runtime

109 Minutes

Director

Marc Webb

Writers

Erin Cressida Wilson, Wilhelm Grimm

Producers

Callum McDougall, Marc Platt

Sources: Box Office Mojo, Luiz Fernando/X