Battle at the Box Office 3/24/25
Snow White may have taken the top spot at the box office, but it was a massive underperformance from the latest live-action Disney remake of one of their classic animated films.
Snow White opened domestically with $43 million, which puts it below the opening of Tim Burton’s remake of Dumbo in 2019. It did open higher than Mufasa: The Lion King, but word of mouth may be drastically different. Snow White has the lowest score ever on CinemaScore for the modern Disney remakes, with a B+. Every other movie has gotten either an A or an A-. That seems to indicate mixed impressions at best, and many potential audience members may decide not to spend money in theaters and wait until it streams on Disney+. There’s also the controversy factor for the low grosses as the movie seemed to offend or upset every possible group due to the casting choices, the cast’s political views, star Rachel Zegler’s seeming dismissal of the original 1937 classic, the use of the Seven Dwarfs and more. The Rotten Tomatoes audience rating is 74%, while the critic rating is 43%. Worldwide, the movie has made $87.1 million so far. With a budget bloated to $270 million (and possibly higher) due to extensive reshoots, a fire on set, and COVID requirements, it would need to make around $600 million to break even, and profiting in the theatrical window is most likely an impossibility. We’ll have to see how much of a drop it suffers this coming weekend; if it’s steeper than average for a family movie, Disney will almost certainly lose hundreds of millions.
Black Bag was second with another $4.2 million, dropping 44% from last weekend’s opening. The movie has $14.7 million domestically and $23.9 million worldwide.
Captain America: Brave New World returned to third place with another $4.1 million. It now has $192.1 million domestically and just over $400 million worldwide.
Novocaine and Mickey 17 rounded out the top five. Novocaine dropped 57% from last week’s opening with another $3.7 million, taking it to $15.7 million for two weeks out. Mickey 17 has $109.8 million worldwide.
The Alto Knights, starring two Robert De Niros, opened outside the top 5. The mob movie’s $3.1 million opening is one of the lowest ever for De Niro, sitting between The War with Grandpa and Once Upon a Time in America, which only opened in 894 theaters and still made $2.4 million back in 1984. New releases Locked and Ash opened outside the top 10.
The best per-theater average went to Secret Mall Apartment, a documentary that played in one theater and made $42,519 over the weekend.
