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Credit: DisneyAs Wicked (2024) heads to well over $100 million in its opening weekend, Disney Animation Studios is eagerly awaiting Moana 2’s (2024) box office numbers. Some experts are expecting Disney’s latest release to score more than $200 million at the box office during the five-day Thanksgiving weekend.
Moana 2 could join Inside Out 2 (2024) and Deadpool & Wolverine (2024) as Disney’s billion-dollar movies this year with that massive weekend. This is fantastic news for Disney Studios after a few lean years after the pandemic. However, there is a problem on the horizon.
In select theaters before Wicked, Disney debuted a new trailer for the live-action Snow White, and it was universally panned. On social media, users criticized the CGI dwarfs and the coloring, which look saturated, as best.
However, most of the criticism was directed toward the film’s star, Rachel Zegler. Zegler has been controversial since she won the role, and she recently made news by hoping that Donald Trump supporters “never know peace.” She has since apologized.
The harshest criticism came from former Disney Imagineer Jim Shull, who said the trailer was “unwatchable ” and that Disney should consider streaming the movie directly, as it did with the live-action Pinocchio (2022) starring Tom Hanks.
However, sending Snow White directly to streaming may not be possible. Disney is already on the hook for hundreds of millions for this film, and with every story, the movie seems destined to make less and less money.
According to Forbes, for Disney to break even on the live-action Snow White, the film must gross around $340 million at the worldwide box office. Forbes analyzed some recent figures released by Disney on the film to determine just how much the movie will need to gross.
Most of the time, Disney is tight-lipped about how much a film costs, but because this movie was filmed in the United Kingdom, Disney had to release the figures to the government.
Because Disney shot most of the movie in the United Kingdom, it qualified for the British Government’s Film Tax Relief. This relief gives movie companies up to 25 percent of the film’s cost to film in London, provided that it represents at least 10 percent of its total cost.
The trailer for Snow White is unwatchable. Pinocchio was directly released to Disney+ and that film starred Tom Hanks. #SnowWhite pic.twitter.com/bXO12wurr4
— Jim Shull (@JimShull) November 22, 2024
This means that Disney had to disclose the cost of the film to receive reimbursement from the British government. In this case, Disney received $41.1 million back from the British government for filming after spending nearly $170 million filming in London.
Now, Disney is stuck with an impending flop that could damage its other releases for early next year, including Captain America: Brave New World (2024). What’s a Disney to do with such a mess?