On August 12, 2024, Rachel Zegler thanked fans on X for pushing the first Snow White trailer to 120 million views in a day. A minute later she added a line to the same thread: “and always remember, free palestine.” Variety reported that the second post drew 8.8 million views, nearly four times the first.

Inside Disney, Variety’s sources said, executives were shocked that the star had mixed a political statement into the launch of a $270 million film. The producer, Marc Platt, flew to New York to talk to her. The post stayed up. Seven months later the film opened to $43 million in North America, below even the lowest forecasts.

What the numbers came to

Snow White opened worldwide on March 21, 2025, and took $87 million over its first weekend. Variety set that against Warner Bros.’ Joker: Folie à Deux, released the previous October. Snow White’s global opening was about $34 million lower, on a budget $70 million higher.

The budget itself is disputed. Variety put it at $270 million, the Guardian at $250 million. Either way, an executive at a rival studio told Variety that the most famous film in Disney’s vault “should be a billion-dollar movie.”

By December, the BBC listed Snow White among the 10 biggest flops of 2025 and reported that it did not make back its budget. It stood out, the BBC noted, in a year when other Disney remakes did well. Lilo & Stitch passed $1 billion, and How to Train Your Dragon was not far behind.

Where the idea came from

The logic was sound on paper. Disney had been turning its animated classics into live-action films since Alice in Wonderland in 2010, followed by Cinderella, The Jungle Book, and Beauty and the Beast. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, from 1937, was the studio’s first full-length animated feature. Disney began developing a live-action version in 2016.

The Guardian’s critic called it one of Disney’s most recognisable, brand-defining characters, and a logical next step. Stephen Galloway, dean of the film school at Chapman University and a former executive editor of The Hollywood Reporter, saw the trap. “You’re going into this with a movie called Snow White,” he told the Guardian. Disney, he said, is a company that avoids controversy at all costs.

Earlier remakes had shown how fairy tales carry political trapdoors. The Guardian recalled the calls to boycott Mulan in 2020, after its lead actor voiced support for the Hong Kong police. Halle Bailey faced racist abuse when she was cast as Ariel in The Little Mermaid. Disney had even been criticised in 2021 when its refreshed Snow White ride at Disneyland kept the prince’s kiss of a sleeping heroine.

Nine years to the screen

Production was meant to start in March 2020. The pandemic pushed it back to March 2022. Then the Hollywood strikes moved the release a full year, from March 22, 2024, to March 21, 2025. Variety also listed a fire on set and costly reshoots, some of which the actors’ strike disrupted.

Empire’s reviewer thought the damage showed on screen. The film felt, the review said, as if it had been recut 100 times, with studio nerves visible in every choice. Empire noted a parallel: the 1937 original had been nicknamed “Disney’s folly” before it opened, then became a landmark.

The dwarfs problem

The seven dwarfs caused trouble years before release. In 2022, Peter Dinklage, who has a form of dwarfism called achondroplasia, called the project backward on Marc Maron’s WTF podcast. He praised Zegler’s casting but asked why the film still told a story of seven dwarfs in a cave. Disney replied that it was consulting members of the dwarfism community to avoid reinforcing stereotypes.

Its answer was to make the dwarfs computer-generated “magical creatures.” The first-look image, released in October 2023, confirmed that choice. That drew a second complaint, that the change denied work to actors with dwarfism.

The effects house MPC built the dwarfs with Andy Serkis’s performance-capture company, Imaginarium Studios, IndieWire reported. Critics were unconvinced. Empire called them “an unholy VFX disaster” that slowed the film every time they appeared. Voice actors including Jeremy Swift, Tituss Burgess, and Martin Klebba voiced them, while separate performers wore capture suits and worked puppets on set so Zegler had someone to play against. Even The Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney, who liked the film, found them “a bit creepy.”

A star who would not stay quiet

Zegler, an American actor of Colombian descent, faced racist abuse after her casting. She told Cosmopolitan that people had turned up at her apartment to shout at her. She had argued that the casting mattered, pointing out that Blanca Nieves is a huge figure in Spanish-speaking countries. The singer Brandy, who played Cinderella in a 1997 version, told Variety that Zegler was doing it for “every little Colombian girl.”

Her relationship with the studio was already strained. Variety reported that it began to fray in 2022, during the awards campaign for West Side Story. Zegler complained publicly that she had not been invited to the Oscars, after Disney’s then production president, Sean Bailey, declined to release her from the Snow White shoot in London. The Academy then gave her a ticket.

She also criticised the original film, which angered some fans. At Disney’s D23 event in 2022 she said her Snow White would not be “saved by the prince.” Elsewhere she called the 1937 film dated and said the prince “literally stalks” the heroine. One top agent told Variety that Disney lost control of the story at that moment, by saying nothing. Variety noted a reason for the silence. Disney was being sued by the actor Gina Carano, who says she was fired from The Mandalorian for her opinions, which made the studio wary of policing anyone’s speech.

After the 2024 US election, Zegler posted on Instagram that she hoped Trump supporters would “never know peace.” She later apologised. Variety reported that Disney then paid for a social media adviser to vet her posts before release.

Two sides at once

Gal Gadot, who played the Evil Queen, drew anger from the other direction. She had served in the Israel Defense Forces, and her stance on the Israel-Hamas war prompted Palestinian groups to call for a boycott. Variety reported that death threats against her rose after Zegler’s post, and that Disney paid for extra security.

The Guardian summed up the result as a children’s film that managed to annoy both ends of the political spectrum. Right-wing commentators attacked Zegler’s casting as “woke.” The Daily Wire went as far as making its own rival version. Pro-Palestinian campaigners objected to Gadot.

By the week of release, Disney had pulled back. It dropped the usual Leicester Square red carpet in London. Six days before opening, it scaled down the Hollywood premiere and limited press to its own in-house outlets.

What the critics saw

The reviews split along the Atlantic. BBC News reported that British critics mostly panned it while American critics were kinder. The Times’ Kevin Maher wrote: “Believe the anti-hype, it’s that bad.” The Guardian’s review called it “exhaustingly awful.”

Variety’s Owen Gleiberman called it one of the better live-action Disney adaptations. Rooney called it “mostly captivating,” and praised Erin Cressida Wilson’s “smart script.” IndieWire’s critic judged it good but not great, and sweet.

The BBC’s reviewer saw a film trying to be two things. Some of the producers seemed to want a respectful tribute, others a revisionist call to arms, and the film tried to be both. Rotten Tomatoes gave it an initial critics’ score of 47%.

Some things worked. Empire praised Zegler’s singing and the new songs by Pasek and Paul. It also liked Gadot’s big number and a twist in which the Queen’s powers depend on her beauty.

Why it did not land

Jeff Bock, an analyst at Exhibitor Relations, told Variety that the old saying about all press being good press was “unabashedly wrong” in this case. Years of negative stories, he said, combined with weak reviews to put off many ticket buyers.

The BBC’s Caryn James described the film as “the victim of its moment.” The BBC’s year-end verdict was harsher about the film itself. It would have needed to be magical to overcome the bad publicity, and it was not.

Variety pointed to a wider trend too. Disney’s live-action remakes, once reliable, had looked shakier for years, with Dumbo among the weaker results.

What it left behind

The film’s own story matched its making. Snow White is named, in this version, for a snowstorm she survived as a baby rather than for her skin. She wants to lead her people, and her love interest, played by Andrew Burnap, is no longer a prince. Those changes were meant to modernise the tale. To its detractors they became the evidence in a fight the film could not win.

Galloway had put the problem simply before release. “It’s a complete quagmire but, realistically, what did they expect?” he asked the Guardian.