Having had a rocky few years following the pandemic, Disney seemed to have regained its grip on the movie box office last year.
Three of 2024’s highest grossing movies worldwide were from the Mouse House – with Inside Out 2, Deadpool & Wolverine and Moana 2 taking more than $4 billion between them. Mufasa, its follow on from the live action remake of The Lion King, was also the 6th highest grossing movie of 2024 with a take of nearly $720m.
And the stage was set for another slam dunk with its next major release – a live action remake of its beloved 1937 classic Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (which in turn was based on the Grimm Brothers tale).
But things haven’t gone to plan.
In its opening weekend it topped the charts and took in more than $87m globally – which may sound pretty good on the face of it. the context matters in deciding whether a film has actually had a good performance or not. If this was a cheap indie film, $87m at the box office is an amazing performance. Even your average release would be happy with it. But this isn’t a cheap indie film, or an average release – it’s a tentpole film from a major studio. And an expensive one at that.
Snow White is estimated to have cost around $250-270m to make – and the rule of thumb is that you need to earn back double your budget at the box office to cover the cost of things like distribution and marketing, as well as giving the cinemas their cut.
So Snow White needs to be hitting about half a billion to break even – and it’s a long way away from that.
Of course some might argue this is just one weekend’s take – but opening weekend is crucial, because that’s when you expect most people who want to see the film will go and do that. It can often represent about a third of a film’s total box office as a result. And a good opening weekend can also create buzz around the film that boosts its performance in later weeks, as it helps generate word of mouth. But if you don’t have that buzz, and you don’t have rave reviews, you don’t have positive momentum to carry you forward.
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What’s gone wrong with the film?
Really Snow White seems to have rolled from one controversy to another since it began.
There was talk of a live action remake as far back as 2016 – but it took a few years before the project actually started to take shape.
It was finally due to start filming in March 2020 – but of course that was the moment that the pandemic brought everything to a halt. So work was postponed, ultimately until 2022. And then, shortly after it did start, a fire broke out on the set that delayed things further.
Eventually filming wrapped in July 2022 – although they had to go back and do reshoots last summer, which is often seen as a bad sign in the movie business.
There’s been lots of controversy over the casting, too, hasn’t there?
Yes – from quite early on too.
There was some criticism – particularly from conservative voices in the US – of the decision to cast Rachel Zegler, a Latina actress, as Snow White.
She has also been and continues to be vocal of her support of Palestine – which further angered some on the right in the US.
At the same time Gal Gadot is a former IDF soldier and has been criticised for her silence on Israel’s attacks on Palestinians.
And of all the things Disney might have expected to be dealing with in promoting this film, having it pulled into the debate around war in the Middle East probably wasn’t on their radar.
But what they may have expected was tension over the retelling of a very old story. Because they’ve faced this problem before – how do you modernise an old story that might have misogynistic or sexist or racist elements, without ending up with a completely different story?
And when Rachel Zegler made comments about her Snow White being stronger than the 1930s version, and joked about how the prince in the original was a bit of a stalker, some people got offended by that too.
And then there were the seven dwarves…
This was maybe the most interesting casting challenge Disney faced with the film. Just as production was finally getting ready to start in 2022, actor Peter Dinklage made comments referring to Snow White as a “backward story”. He accused Disney of hypocrisy by trying to modernise a film – but have it still ultimately hinge on seven dwarves living in a cave.
In response to that Disney said that, in order to avoid reinforcing negative stereotypes, it was going to reimagine the dwarves in a different way. In the end that meant using CGI characters voiced by actors, one of whom is a little person.
But other little people criticised this decision – and Dinklage’s comments. They said that he wasn’t their spokesperson, and that by pushing Disney away from casting real actors, they had lost out on potential roles.
And that really highlights the bind Disney was in in trying to retell this story in particular – because there was probably no way to handle the seven dwarves that didn’t cause controversy.
But this isn’t the only reason why Snow White hasn’t done well. It certainly hasn’t helpful, but often these kinds of issues can be quickly forgotten about if the film is good… but that doesn’t seem to be the case here.
Show White has gotten pretty poor reviews and audience reactions – with the general feeling being it’s a bit of a mess, and lacks the kind of magic the traditional Disney films are known for.
There also seems to be a growing weariness among audiences for all of these live action reimagining of Disney classics.
How many have there been so far?
A lot – and while they feel like a new thing, Disney has actually been doing this for a long time.
Back in 1996 they made a live action version of 101 Dalmatians with Glenn Close playing Cruella DeVil. That did so well it got a sequel – 102 Dalmatians – a few years later.
Then Tim Burton made a live action version of Alice in Wonderland in 2010 – which also did well, and also got a sequel.
But it’s still a few years before they really start to ramp up production on these reimagining’s.
The real spark seems to have been Cinderella, which came out in 2015.
The following year they had a live action Jungle Book; then in 2017 they remade Beauty and the Beast.
But the big bang was 2019 – when they release four live action remakes; Dumbo, Aladdin, The Lion King and Lady and The Tramp (the latter was a straight to Disney Plus release).
And since then we’ve had Mulan, Pinocchio, Peter Pan & Wendy, The Little Mermaid, a Lion King live action sequel, and now Snow White. Not to mention a number of classic-adjacent movies like Christopher Robin (based on Winnie The Pooh), the live action Maleficent movies, and the Cruella prequel.
That means, if you count the sequels and spin offs, we’ve had 22 live action remakes so far.
Why is Disney remaking its old films?
Well the short answer is that they’re making money.
The Lion King is the prime example of that – it made $1.6 billion at the global box office – more than six times its budget.
And that’s despite it getting pretty lukewarm reviews at the time – people complained that it was almost a shot-for-shot remake of the original, except with photo-realistic animals rather than cartoony ones. That ultimately meant that they weren’t nearly as expressive as was the case in the 90s version.
Beauty and the Beast made $1.2 billion – around seven and a half times its budget. And that wasn’t particularly well reviewed, either.
In fact when you look through the box office take for all of these live action remakes – excluding those that were released straight on streaming – none seem to have been a straight up flop. Dumbo came close – it looks like it just about broke even – but it still wasn’t a loss for the studio.
Even though they don’t really have a reason to exist – besides money?
Well there is an element here of Disney trying to remain culturally relevant to new audiences.
It’s worth bearing in mind that Tangled, the animated retelling of Rapunzel, came out in 2010 – and that’s the movie that sparked Disney’s push away from hand-drawn animation and towards 3D animation. Frozen was originally meant to be hand-drawn, but Tangled’s success was part of the reason why they changed it to computer animated.
And that’s important because we’re now 15 years on, and you have a large cohort of people who have grown up only knowing Disney as a 3D animation studio. They don’t have the same connection with the hand drawn stuff – some may even think it looks too old fashioned when they stumble across it on Disney Plus.
So the aim of the live action remakes is, in part, to make those stories interesting to that audience.
It’s debatable as to whether they can claim victory there, though, because for the most part these films don’t seem to have had much cultural resonance.
Some of the releases have been relatively well received by critics and fans – Cinderella, for example, directed by Kenneth Brannagh, was seen as a good attempt at retelling an old story for a modern audience. But most of the other releases have – at best gotten an okay reception. And they certainly don’t seem to have the same kind of stickiness as the originals did for previous generations.
But another very important market that also doesn’t have much of an emotional connection with classic Disney animation is China – because China was quite isolated culturally up until the 1990s, so the old Snow White and Cinderella, and even Lion King, don’t really mean much to adults or children there.
And a lot of these live action remakes have performed quite well in China by the standards of American movies.
And of course there’s also an element of Disney trying to tap into good old fashioned nostalgia – which a lot of firms are doing nowadays.
They’re hoping that by breathing new life into some of their older stories, they’ll attract people who grew up watching the Lion King or The Jungle Book and get them to go and see a modern remake in the cinema. Or maybe even get them to bring their kids to the cinema and start building their connection with the Disney brand.
There is also a theory that Disney is making these movies as a way of holding onto the copyright of some of the stories they’re based on – often times rights deals have clauses that the property has to be used within X amount of time or it reverts back to the original owner.
That’s unlikely to be the case here, though, because so many of these films are based either old folk and fairy tales, or old stories that are now out of copyright – like The Jungle Book, Alice in Wonderland, or Hamlet.
But could Snow White’s poor performance put an end to all of these remakes?
It will certainly make Disney pause for a second and maybe start to question the logic of the strategy.
They’re unlikely to completely abandon the remake project on the back of one flop –they might just see it as an isolated incident. And really they can’t abandon it just yet because they also have a couple more live action remakes nearing release – including Lilo & Stitch, which comes out in less than two months.
A live action Moana is due to arrive in the summer of 2026 and, after the Moana 2 cartoon did so well at Christmas time, they’ll have high hopes for this one in particular being a hit.
Meanwhile other live action remakes that are in the early stages of production, or mooted for a future release, include Hercules, Bambi, Tangled and The Aristocats. But you can be sure that if Lilo and Stitch or Moana – or both – flop, many of those will quickly disappear off the slate.
