Disney’s live-action “Snow White” is officially a bust. The film earned a domestic intake of $43M, and $87M worldwide total, from Thursday to Sunday, and that's against a $270M budget.
When all is said and done, “Snow White” could give “The Marvels” a run for its money — that film had losses exceeding $300M. In fact, according to Variety, the break-even point for “Snow White” is at $700M. This is going to be a brutal money loser for Disney.
From the get-go, “Snow White” was mired in controversy. You could easily choose any of the following reasons for its downfall; CGI dwarves? Rachel Zegler? Multiple delays? Disney’s never-ending string of live-action remakes?
In an N.Y. Times piece titled “Snow White and the Seven Kajillion Controversies,” Brooks Barnes suggests that the film’s failure to find an audience might have had to do with the current political climate.
“Really never, but especially right now, no studio wants its movie branded as a D.E.I. lesson […] Disney hoped that prominent voices on the left would step up to deliver a pushback to the pushback. But it didn’t happen.
“‘But the “anti-woke right” has grown more powerful […] while defenders on the left have grown quieter, either because they feel cowed or frustrated or because even they have come to see Hollywood’s aggressive diversity efforts as clumsy.”
D.E.I. or not, what Barnes doesn’t seem to get is that, from the get-go, you could sense a lack of artistic integrity in this project. Unlike Zegler, the world wasn’t upset with the 1937 original (which is a masterpiece) and there was absolutely nobody clamoring for it to be fixed for today’s sensibilities. This was another obvious attempt by Disney to make more money and sell merchandise, and for once, it failed.
In the coming weeks and months, there will no doubt be blame games about what went wrong on “Snow White” and many, much like the N.Y. Times, will point the finger at the current cultural-political climate, and how the film — shot in 2022 — might have been released a few years too late.
“Hope,” Na’s first film in ten years — his last one being the exemplary “The Wailing” —is a gloriously messy, blood-soaked sci-fi epic that may become a cult classic despite—or because of—its polarizing nature.