Box Office Update: Snow White on track for an underwhelming opening

The box office numbers are starting to roll in, and so far, it looks like Snow White is underperforming badly for Disney. Whether it was the toxic word-of-mouth or middling reviews, the family audience that typically allowed the Mouse House’s animated-to-live action remakes to open in the $90-100 million range just are turning out for this one. Early this week, we predicted that Snow White would make $55 million – which itself would have been disastrous for a $300 million movie, but Deadline is reporting the numbers are far worse. According to them, the movie will only open in the mid-40s, which is about the same level Disney’s Dumbo remake opened to, with that being considered a notable flop that led to Tim Burton quitting directing for several years. And that movie cost about half of what Snow White did.

The only silver lining for Disney is that the movie has an okay B+ CinemaScore. Over the holidays, Mufasa opened even worse with $36 million, but it was able to hang in there at the box office, making over $250 million domestically. Snow White would be very lucky to get to that level, although there’s not a lot of competition for family movies coming out over the next few weeks. 

Warner Bros’s big piece of counter-programming, The Alto Knights, is proving to be yet another disaster for the studio. The $50 million gangster flick will only open to about $3 million, with it bound to go down as one of the biggest box office disasters in recent memory. What went wrong? I believe that audiences were confused by Robert De Niro playing both roles. Also, a movie like this depends on critical raves, and Barry Levinson’s film is too stately. The fact is, a movie like this needs a really dynamic director. Scorsese could have made this into a masterpiece, but under Levinson, it was only ok, although it could play a lot better after it makes its Max debut in a few weeks.

Anyway, you slice it; this is proving to be another terrific weekend for the 2025 box office, which badly needs to be resuscitated.

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