Disney went woke and broke, the final accounting for the studio’s 2025 debacle remake Snow White is in and the amount of cash the Mouse House lost on the film is staggering.
The actual accounting for the film industry is notoriously hard to figure, of course, and Hollywood works the books very closely to hide as much of their actual profits and losses as possible. For instance, the U.S. film studios do not publicly report what they spend or make on individual movies. They usually lump all productions into one report for the year showing only overviews and baselines, not individual costs, according to Forbes magazine.
However, in the U.K. things are a bit different. That is because the British government has a huge financial incentive program that pays back credits to filmmakers who decide to produce inside the U.K. But one of the requirements for these tax breaks or credits is that producers have to provide the government with precisely itemized expenditures per movie.
Consequently, since Snow White was made chiefly in the U.K., Forbes was able to come to an understanding of what Disney spent on the remake of the famed 1937 animated classic, how much it earned, and how much it ultimately lost.
Of course, the show was in the red zone before it even entered theaters. Star Rachel Zegler seriously hurt the production by running all over the world dissing the beloved original movie as “sexist” and outdated, and leaking her virulently left-wing and anti-Trump politics all over every interview she had for the film. Then came the first trailers which earned some of the worst negative downvotes ever seen on Youtube.
It wasn’t just Zegler’s mouth that earned the movie negative perceptions. Fans also hated the creepy AI animation for the beloved Seven Dwarfs. All the criticism of the film caused rewrites and reshoots and millions to fund all that.
When it finally debuted after several years of constant criticism, the film flopped hard taking in only $87.3 million in its opening weekend, 13% less than forecast, making it the fifth lowest-grossing live-action remakes of classic cartoon films in Disney history, Forbes reported.
Ultimately, thanks to the numbers seen via the U.K.’s reporting requirements, it appears that Disney spent $336.5 million making Snow White. That is higher than any of its other blockbuster films.
With the U.K. government reimbursing Disney to the tune of $64.9 million thanks to its film industry tax break program, that brings the cost of production down to $271.6 million. From there, about 49 percent of the box office take was handed over to the theaters that showed Snow White.
All that means that Disney lost about $168.7 million on Snow White, according to Forbes.
Granted, the film will be making money through rentals, streaming, DVD sales, and merchandise. But those sales also come with their own production costs and it isn’t likely that the totals will materially change the final film production accounting much for the better.
In the end, this makes Snow White one of the biggest film financing disasters in Hollywood history and certainly a huge problem for Disney.
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