Disney has done the impossible, and made Snow White an even bigger bomb

Hi-ho, it’s back to the cinema for Disney’s flop live-action Snow White. Having originally crashed and burned in March, the movie misfired all over again after the House of Mouse re-released it in the US last week. Talk about putting the “grim” in Grimm Fairy Tale.

Disney’s apparent calculation was that that the advent of summer blockbuster season could give this dead-on-arrival feature a new lease of life. You can sort of appreciate the logic: after all, May saw the ailing Marvel Cinematic Universe return from purgatory when Thunderbolts proved a surprise hit.

Where a caped crusader can go, surely Snow White and her terrifying CGI dwarf friends could follow? Who, moreover, wouldn’t want to hear Gal Gadot ham her way through the dreadful All Is Fair one last time? A sort of evil twin of Frozen’s Let It Go, the tune has acquired a cult fanbase on social media, where people are intoxicated by its sheer, “how did this get made?” awfulness.

Sadly for Disney, such logic did not long survive contact with reality. Incredibly, the second coming of Snow White was an even bigger disaster than the original run. Unleashed on unsuspecting 1,000 cinemas across the US, the Rachel Zegler v Gal Gadot calamity brought in a pitiful $252 per screen. To date, the remake has cost Disney an estimated $115 million – much of the cost eaten up for by the bizarre decision to have Zegler act opposite CGI dwarfs straight from the Uncanny Valley.

The studio will no doubt claw back some of that cash when Snow White is released to video streaming this month. But if the film is about to be made available at home, why put it back in cinemas? It’s the most illogical re-release since Sony tried to capitalise on the mockery directed at its dire Jared Leto superhero bust Morbius by putting it back in cinemas in June 2022 – when it did almost as badly as Snow White, bringing in $289 “per theatre”.

Hollywood could never be accused of clear-eyed thinking. In the case of Snow White, common sense dictated that the beloved animated classic should have been left well alone to begin with. In the case of Morbius, it has been asserted that Sony knew the film would crash hard second time around – but hoped the ensuing headlines would generate publicity for future superhero projects, including its more successful Tom Hardy Venom series.

“Putting Morbius back into theatres, knowing full well it would play in mostly empty auditoriums, is a way to keep the character in the news cycle,” claimed Forbes.

The other theory is that Hollywood’s obsession with re-releasing old films has led to the mistaken idea that somewhere out there were people who wanted to sit through Snow White on the big screen a second time. Without question, re-releases have been a good news story in the industry. As Snow White flopped all over again, the 20-year-old Star Wars movie Revenge of the Sith blitzed its way to a $25 million (re)opening weekend.

Not bad for the concluding chapter of George Lucas’s much-mocked prequels trilogy – a series so bad that its star, Natalie Portman, worried it had ruined her career. Two decades on, Lucas’s Sith show was embraced as a lost classic. “There is a hunger out there for big-screen Star Wars content,” Shawn Robbins, director of movie analytics at Fandango, explains to Business Insider. “It’s definitely not gone away.”

The revenge of Revenge of the Sith is part of a wider trend of cashing in on internet fandom for older films. An Imax re-release of Christopher Nolan’s touchy feelie black hole epic Interstellar sold out almost its entire run in the US last year. Similarly, a restored version of the creepy animated classic Coraline outperformed expectations on both sides of the Atlantic in 2024 – notwithstanding a breaking scandal concerning the personal life of the original novel’s author, Neil Gaiman.

“Moviegoers want to see films outside of their home,” exhibitor relations analyst Jeff Bock told Variety. “That is the future bloodline of the industry.”

The success of the Coraline re-release was about more than grassroots nostalgia. Laika, the stop motion animation studio that made the film in 2010, had noted the emergence of an online following for the film – with its biggest fans typically too young to have seen the movie in cinemas 14 years ago.

“We began to gather around the idea that there was a demand, particularly from fans who may have discovered it on home media,” Laika marketing officer David Burke told Variety. Laika took the lead by creating TikTok content around the movie – further fuelling nostalgia for the film by “fostering [an] intentionally cultivated sense of community.”

In the case of Revenge of the Sith and Coraline, the crucial ingredient is time. For Gen Z fans, the chance to see these films on the big screen was too good to pass up – who knows when they will next have the opportunity? But Snow White only left cinemas in April. It took its leave to the echo of some of the worst reviews this side of Tom Hooper’s Cats (a movie all involved are happy to chuck into the void and never discuss again).

It isn’t unthinkable that Snow White might one day acquire a cult following – terrible films often do. But that process will not happen overnight, In rushing too quickly back into the cinema, Disney merely reminded audiences of the terrible judgement that had led to the cack-handed reboot in the first place. It would take a power-drunk evil queen to conclude otherwise.

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