The Walt Disney Company’s Snow White film failed to hit global expectations and is now predicted to lose around $250 million.
According to The-Numbers, the film only grossed $43 million in its domestic opening and added another $44.3 million internationally for a global gross of $87.3 million.
Depending on who you ask, the film failed to meet expectations domestically or just barely surpassed it. Shawn Robbins at Box Office Theory predicted ahead of this weekend the film would do $42 million domestically while Anthony D’Alessandro and Nancy Tartaglione at Deadline predicted it would do between $45 and $50 million. Rebecca Rubin at Variety also expected it to do between $45 and $50 million.
On the global front both Deadline and Variety expected the film to do around or above $100 million.
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Interestingly enough, the film is following a similar trajectory to Marvel Studios’ The Marvels, which eventually was yanked from theaters before it even hit the $200 million global gross mark.
In fact, The Marvels had a better domestic opening than Snow White albeit it was carried by a much stronger Friday while Snow White best it on both Saturday and Sunday.
Globally, The Marvels had a $110 million opening.
Given the poor global box office, box office analyst OMB Reviews predicts the film will likely lose The Walt Disney Company $250 million.
He predicts the film will end its global run with “a box office of around $260 to $270 million if those numbers hold. If an average runs happens. If it doesn’t overperform. If it doesn’t do better down the line, doesn’t have strong legs, looking at a final total of $260 million globally by the end of its run.”
“And if that’s where this film ends, guess what? That’s $250 million+ maybe even $300 million in financial losses and that’s using the $270 million production budget number,” he added. “With $270 million as your production budget, your break even is between $675 and $810 million.”
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However, it is likely the film’s production budget is much higher than $270 million given Caroline Reid at Forbes had previously discovered back in September 2023 that Disney had spent $209.3 million on the film as of July 2022. A little over a year later Reid reported that the budget had ballooned to $269.4 million albeit, Disney received a $55.5 million reimbursement bringing its net spend to $213.9 million. However, given the film still had to go through post-production as well as rumors of other reshoots and fixes, it’s rumored the budget bulged to over half a billion.
Scooper WDW Pro claimed, “We know that this film had a budget that was somewhere around $300 million. They have overshot that significantly according to my source and this film is now heading towards for The Force Awakens and The Rise of Palpatine — That’s what I’m going to call it — kind of budget.”
“We’re nearing the half billion dollar mark according to the source,” he shared.
Given the likelihood the budget is much larger than $270 million, OMB Reviews indicated that the film might need to do between $900 million or even over a $1 billion to just break even.
He stated, “There’s no way. There’s no chance in heck that that film is going to get anywhere close to those numbers. And so you are just looking at a situation here where things are not looking good at all.”
What do you make of Snow White’s opening weekend at the box office?