One Good Thing Came Out of Disney's Live Action Snow White

We will probably never hear from Rachel Zegler again, or at least not for a good long time. Martin Montanaro at That Park Place we get the following. Disney’s Snow White Flop Exposed: Rachel Zegler Controversy, Ballooning Budget, And Box Office Collapse Cost Studio $170 Million

Rachel Zegler is young woman with a reasonably pleasant singing voice. She is no Sade. She is no Whitney Houston. She cannot sing like either Simone Simons or Floor Jansen. And she cannot keep her mouth shut when promoting a movie that cost hundreds of millions of dollars to produce and market.

Now, the failure of Snow White is not all on Zegler. The story was bad. The CGI was nightmare-inducing. The music was bad. The production quality was poor, considering what they spent on this disaster. But she played her part in the disaster.

Caroline Reid, of Forbes, does an excellent job of combing through the tax documents filed in the United Kingdom to determine the actual budget of movies produced there. Not the budget reported in the Hollywood press, not the budget disclosed by the studios, but what they actually filed with the British government to get their tax rebates.

Martin Montanaro at That Park Place, also includes Marketing estimates, which Ms. Reid does not do, because there are no iron-clad documents to reference.

Per financial filings tied to the film’s U.K. production entity, Snow White racked up a staggering $336.5 million production cost — putting it in the same spending tier as major franchise tentpoles like Star Wars and Avengers films.

That alone would have been a massive gamble for a remake of a nearly 90-year-old animated classic.

OK, so let's look at those costs, before Disney spent a dime on marketing.

And here’s where the math turns brutal.

Studios don’t keep all box office revenue. Theater chains typically retain about half of ticket sales, meaning Disney’s actual return from the film’s theatrical run lands around $102.9 million.

Stack that against the $271.6 million net production cost, and you’re staring at a theatrical loss of roughly $168–170 million.

That half of ticket sales number is fairly close. If you are interested in diving really deep into the numbers, I suggest you look up the YouTube channel OMB Reviews. Odin loves numbers, and he goes into (nearly) autistic detail about costs, box-office sharing percentages, marketing estimates, and the rest.

But back to Marvin M's article.

Blockbuster films of this scale don’t just carry massive production budgets — they require equally aggressive global promotional campaigns. Industry tracking routinely places marketing and distribution costs for major Disney tentpoles in the $100 million to $150 million range, depending on the breadth of the rollout.

If you even go with the low-end estimate of $100K, Disney lost at least a quarter of a billion dollars on this crap, and probably lost more than $300 million. That seems insane.

And that was only one Disney flop in 2025. They seem to be specializing in disasters recently.