The Real Reasons Disney’s ‘Snow White’ Underperformed Aren’t What You’ve Been Told

After years of much speculated-about delays, Disney’s live-action-ish Snow White landed with a thud in theaters this spring, along the way notching a new low in the company’s series of adaptations of its own animated classics (at least among those that were released to movie theaters and not straight to Disney+). In the aftermath of its relative underperformance and its recent arrival on Disney+, the industry trades have been peddling “behind-the-scenes” stories that contain very little information and mostly seem to place the blame squarely on star Rachel Zegler, just as Disney would prefer (and as Decider predicted would be the case before the movie was released). Even those disinclined to blame an actress’s tweets for a movie’s disappointing box office have raised the Zegler-adjacent point that perhaps audiences were affronted by the tradition-defying casting of a Latina woman in this role.

Yet there are simpler and better explanations for Snow White’s box office, and the dimming of Disney magic, than racial grievances. In fact, Deadline reported that the movie did better than expected in many “red” areas of the country, owing in part to Latino audiences turning out in those areas. (This is also, disappointment and all, still the second-biggest opening weekend of 2025, suggesting bigger box office problems than those experienced by this particular film.) It seems like maybe the sky-high levels of interest for this movie among kids and adults alike just wasn’t there. Just as Disney gleefully raided its own catalog to produce these re-envisionings of their classic movies, they should now be able to embrace their own role in the project’s potential collapse.

Though Disney remade The Jungle Book and 101 Dalmatians in live-action back in the ’90s, the modern Disney remake can be traced to Tim Burton’s version of Alice in Wonderland, which did massive, billion-dollar business in 2010. Interestingly, this was not really sold as Disney’s cartoon remade; the marketing naturally pushed Tim Burton and Johnny Depp, while the story itself is not at all a remake of the animated Alice. It’s a sequel to the original Lewis Carroll story, with Alice returning to a desiccated Wonderland as a near-grown adult facing the prospect of an arranged marriage. Whatever you think of the movie (and it’s far more harmless than its angriest anti-fans would suggest), it’s far more Return to Oz than the 101 Dalmatians with Glenn Close.

Post-Alice, there has been a thread of creative revisionism in their big Disney’s Disney productions: Maleficent and Cruella are villain’s-eye-view stories, extracting the most famous characters from Sleeping Beauty and Dalmatians (again!) and giving them their sympathetic origin stories, and Burton returned to the Disney fold once more with Dumbo, which uses the slim 1941 original as fodder for the first half of the movie, then continues the story past that point with greater human interest.

Dumbo is one of the best and most fully realized of the Disney remakes. It’s also one of the lowest-grossing of the bunch, because by 2019 it was competing with far flashier hits of ’90s-kid nostalgia. Following the success of another Jungle Book re-do in 2016, Disney flooded the market with big-budget remakes of Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and The Lion King, essentially the holy trinity of modern Disney-animation dominance. These movies, along with The Little Mermaid, were perfectly positioned to motivate millennial parents who grew up on endless VHS rewatches of those movies, and likely subjected their kids to the disc-and-digital version of the same thing in the 2010s.

The original Snow White, meanwhile, wasn’t even released on VHS until 1994, well after a generation was pretty locked into Ariel, Belle, and the Genie. Plenty of children doubtless watched it then, as well as during a successful 1993 theatrical re-release, but this was also the tail-end of the Disney re-release era, hastened by the blockbuster success of their newer films. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs will always be a landmark in cinema history and one of the most popular films of all time. It will not, however, always be a majority choice for a contemporary kid’s favorite Disney cartoon.

Indeed, Disney seemed to understand that some of its earlier properties would not be nearly a Lion King-level bonanza at the box office. No less a filmmaker than Robert Zemeckis did a Pinocchio remake that never even made it to theaters, languishing as a streaming embarrassment alongside other remakes of older movies like Lady and the Tramp and Peter Pan.

Still, it makes sense that Disney would want to save a remake of its first animated feature for theaters. But after more than 15 of these movies and their various sequels and prequels in the past 15 years, they’ve saturated the Disney-by-Disney market the same way they did for Marvel and Star Wars. As with those brands, plenty of YouTube grifters and armchair analysts have happily ascribed the problem to a particular movie: It’s The Marvels! It’s The Last Jedi! It’s Solo! It’s Quantumania! (And, with that, the demographic-obsessed micro-blamings: It’s Brie Larson! It’s girls leading Star Wars! It’s Rachel Zegler not liking Trump!) No, it’s the sheer volume of these things. Disney thought that between Marvel, Star Wars, live-action remakes, Pixar, and classic Disney animation, they could manufacture between five and ten movie events annually, in perpetuity. That turned out to work in 2019, and then not again. Kids grow up, lost interest in their parents’ interests, and parents’ interests change. They listen to YouTubers slamming everything Disney does, and if you slam everything, you’ll occasionally be right.

That doesn’t mean future Disney remakes won’t sometimes hit. Take, for example, the Lilo & Stitch live-action remake ($858 million in worldwide box office as of this writing … and still counting). Why did Lilo succeed where Snow White failed? Demographics. Kids of multiple eras love Stitch, and, hey, would you look at that: Kids from 2002 have reached parenting age themselves. Hey, maybe those Treasure Planet weirdos will finally have their day! But as Treasure Planet proved back in 2002, not every Disney everything can be eventized into a massive blockbuster. That’s the thing about magic: If it was assured and predictable, it wouldn’t count as magic anymore.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn podcasting at www.sportsalcohol.com. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others.