Did anyone actually believe Disney when they ran to Deadline with that $270M budget figure for “Snow White”? I certainly didn’t.
That “official” figure didn’t make an iota of sense, and yet the trades took Disney’s word for it. They didn’t even take into consideration that Forbes had reported the film costing $270M in December 2023, and that was before reshoots and post production work would occur on “Snow White” the following spring and summer.
Now we have The New York Times mentioning that “Snow White” cost $80M more than Disney tried to make us believe. Their figure has the film running in excess of $350M. Do you now understand why Disney had to throw Rachel Zegler under the bus? They needed a scapegoat for this utter catastrophe they have to deal with.
“Snow White” has to make $800M to break even, and I’m being generous here by not even adhering to the customary X2.5 rule. The fact that the film only earned $87M worldwide in its opening weekend should be of grave concern for Disney. By the end of its run, the film might not even hit a $250M global tally. You do the math. “Snow White” is set to become one of the biggest bombs in movie history.
The film nearly doubled its originally intended budget ($180M) — no doubt, and mostly, due to multiple rounds of reshoots, rewrites, and most pertinently, a Peter Dinklage-led backlash about those damn dwarves. Dinklage was a real douche about it; Disney received plenty of pushback after he spoke out against including little people being cast as the dwarves. They were eventually replaced by CGI monstrosities.
What I want to know is the exact amount of money that would have been saved if Disney had decided to ignore Dinklage’s ranting, not used CGI and just stuck with the original plan of casting seven actors with dwarfism.
From the get-go, “Snow White” was mired in controversy. What was the primary reason for its downfall? That’ll be for the history books to decide, but it was very likely just a perfect storm of CGI dwarves, Rachel Zegler, the multiple delays, and live-action remake fatigue.