Snow White Opens With a Soft $3.5 Million In Its Opening Day Premiere

You might think that kids wouldn't show up for Thursday night "previews" so this number is pretty good.

But the Thursday "preview" for this film began at 2pm. And it's Spring break, so kids were at home.

It's a meh opening at best.

Snow White Opens 46% Worse Than The Marvels in Thursday Preview Box Office--Legacy Media Scrambles to Spin It as a Win

The numbers are in, and they're damning. Disney's troubled live-action Snow White remake earned a paltry $3.5 million in Thursday box office preview showings. That figure alone would be embarrassing for any Disney tentpole, but when you stack it against Marvel Studios' widely panned flop The Marvels, the situation becomes downright catastrophic.

The Marvels, which has become a cautionary tale within the Disney machine, still managed $6.5 million in Thursday previews. That's nearly 46% higher than Snow White's opening night take. And what happened to The Marvels after that soft start? It went on to open to just $46 million and earned just $206 million worldwide through its entire run. The film was universally recognized as one of the studio's biggest box office flops.

Now imagine what lies ahead for Snow White--a film burdened with an eye-watering $250 million-plus budget, a wave of bad press, a Rotten 46% critic score, and a lead actress who has alienated large swaths of the audience.

Yet if you're reading outlets like The Hollywood Reporter, Deadline, or The Wrap, you'd think Disney is on the verge of another Frozen-level success.

Each outlet has rushed out glowing headlines, bending over backward to spin the disastrous opening. THR even had the audacity to call the $3.5 million haul "promising," while comparing it to the underwhelming $2.8 million preview of Dumbo--a film no one considers a success story. It should be noted Dumbo had a budget of just $170 million. The failure of Dumbo was so extreme that Tim Burton stopped making movies for five years after its release, effectively ending his long-standing relationship with Disney.

In other words, outperforming Dumbo is far from the symbol of excellence the mainstream access media wants you to believe it is.

A post-showing polling firm found that only 39% of those coming out of the theater would "definitely recommend" it to friends and family, a poor score indicating that this movie will probably do poor business in its second and third weeks as word-of-mouth spreads.

Disney engaged in deceptive propaganda by inviting its hand-picked shills to see the movie and post early "social media reactions." The media spun these not-quite-reviews from hand-picked shills as great news for the movie. They put an embargo on actual reviews from non-hand-picked reviewers until the last possible second.

But then the actual reviews started coming out.

The Snow White shill brigade isn't going to like this. Disney's Rachel Zegler-led Snow White remake splatted onto Rotten Tomatoes today and the results were far less flattering than the glowing social media reviews of just a few days ago.

The embargo has lifted, and the truth is finally out: Disney's live-action Snow White has officially earned a rotten rating on Rotten Tomatoes, clocking in at a dismal 49%. It's a brutal wake-up call, especially when contrasted with the studio's carefully controlled early social media reactions that bizarrely labeled the film a "triumphant return to form" for Disney and called Rachel Zegler a "super nova."
Snow White Rotten Tomatoes

This sharp drop in critical reception highlights exactly why Disney delayed lifting the review embargo until just 24 hours before release. The studio knew the real reviews would paint a far less flattering picture than the hand-picked influencers and Disney-friendly outlets who showered the film with premature praise.

Here's just a sampling of what critics on Rotten Tomatoes had to say about Snow White.

Odie Henderson, Boston Globe:
"I had high hopes that *Snow White* would make me happy. Instead, this dopey remake made me sleepy and grumpy."

DarkSkyLady, Nerdist:
"With an uneven combination of forgettable music, bland choreography, and few genuine laughs, Snow White fails to find and maintain its footing."

Joonatan Itkonen, Toisto.net:
"This is a film that tries very hard to not take risks or even acknowledge that risks exist. The result is a hodgepodge of awful CGI, contrived new songs, and a story full of plot and lacking in substance."

Abe Friedtanzer, Awards Buzz:
"This reimagining of a story everyone knows lacks imagination, essentially translating a solid text with the least possible creativity and depth."
Even Positive Reviews Are Barely Positive

Perhaps more telling is how lukewarm even the positive reviews are. The majority of them boil down to "Well....it's not the WORST thing I've ever seen..."

...

These Snow White Rotten Tomatoes reviews are certainly a far cry from the over-the-top praise shouted by early social media reviewers who gushed about Zegler's performance and positioned the film as a triumphant return to form. Now that the embargo has lifted, it's clear that those early reactions were more about access and optics than honest critique.

Even hard left outlets are panning the film:

The BBC softly praises the movie as, get this, "not calamitous."

With its creepy CGI dwarfs and muddled tone, Disney's latest live-action remake is "not calamitous" but is a "a mind-boggling mash-up".

...

The good news for the studio is that the film itself is not so calamitous. It's not the worst of the studio's live-action remakes (that's Robert Zemeckis's straight-to-streaming dud, Pinocchio), and while it's not the best, either, it's undoubtedly the most fascinating. What's so unique about Disney's Snow White is that it seems as if some of the producers wanted to make an old-fashioned tribute to a feudal fairy tale, and the others wanted to make a revisionist, Marxist call-to-arms. Rather than settling on one option or the other, the producers apparently compromised by making both versions at once, so the results are like a mind-boggling mash-up of two different films.

...

The film's split personality problems don't go away. Half of it is set in a grimy, gloomy land where Snow White wants to foment a peasants' revolt and restore a socialist utopia, but half of it is set in a chirpy, brightly-coloured fantasy realm of benign and beautiful aristocrats. Half the time, the characters are belting out overwrought, self-empowerment anthems by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, the songsmiths behind The Greatest Showman. But half the time they're trilling the jaunty 1937 ditties by Frank Churchill and Larry Morey.

Perhaps we should appreciate the value for money: the studio is in effect giving us two films for the price of one.

The Guardian:

Snow White review -- Disney's exhaustingly awful reboot axes the prince and makes the dwarves mo-cap

With tiresome pseudo-progressive additions that tie the whole thing in knots, this is a waste of estimable entertainers like Rachel Zegler and Gal Gadot

John Sexton posts some more reviews:

To start with, the reviews aren't good. This is currently at 45% among reviewers which suggests this never really had a chance of being something people wanted to see. Let's just start with the top critics. One of the problems many reviewers mention is the look of the dwarves. Here's how the Globe and Mail review put it:

Grumpy, Doc, Sleepy, Dopey -- they're all highly unnerving spoonfuls of nightmare fuel, their dead-eyed compositions resting somewhere deep inside the uncanny valley of CGI artifice.

The new film ditches some of the classic songs and changes up some of the ones that remain. The Austin Chronicle wasn't impressed.

Which is more astounding? That Disney let Pasek and Paul, the team behind the widely loathed Dear Evan Hansen, write more songs? Or that even they could somehow massacre seemingly indestructible classics like "Heigh-Ho" and "Whistle While You Work" with terrible new arrangements and asinine new lyrics?

And then of course there's the politics which clearly pervade this remake or reimagining. Here's a paragraph from the Wall Street Journal:

The songs "I'm Wishing" and "Someday My Prince Will Come" have been cut; the big what-she-wants number near the outset is called "Waiting on a Wish." Instead of longing for true love (=fairy tale), Snow White hopes to sharpen her leadership skills (=M.B.A. program). And she keeps talking about a more equitable distribution of wealth in the kingdom she is destined to rule...

...
The Times of London review is brutal when it comes to Disney's politics-first approach:

this Snow White, cooked up by The Amazing Spider-Man director Marc Webb and umpteen screenwriters (including Greta Gerwig and Jez Butterworth) through a near decade's development, emerges as the epitome of Disney's Pravda-like approach to contemporary adaptation -- prescriptive politics first, followed by "inspirational" messaging, followed by more politics. And drama? And story? And character? Nope. These are, it seems, decadent tools of the oppressor.

Of course that approach works for some reviewers. Enter the Washington Post:

"Snow White" feels fresh enough to pass, and it's certainly not the disaster a lot of people seem to have hoped for. The kids and their parents will like it, and girls and boys of all ages might even welcome a Snow White who slightly more actively resists a dictatorial ruler and brings her squabbling, divided countrymen together.

"Not the disaster a lot of people seem to have hoped for." Put that on the poster!

Why are even leftwing reviewers panning the movie? I think they've been carrying water for Disney for years, because Marxist Solidarity demands they defend the woke propaganda company from the critiques of The Deplorables. But all through this ten years of claiming that every shitty, soulless, passion-free, low-effort corporate cashgrab movie was a terrific has gotten to them. Since corporations went woke and Marxists, leftwingers have been in the strange position of defending mega-corporations from the people. And they weren't just defending a mega-corporation, they were defending empty, stupid exploitations of old IPs, which also rankled their Marxist hearts.

I think it's like claiming that Biden is physically and mentally fit and wearing out his 20-something-staffers: They feel compelled to lie for the Great Marxist Cause but years and years of lying gnaw at them. They're getting tired of having to lie on behalf of a mega-corporation, and are starting to sprinkle some truth in with their lies.

Leftwingers, with their skinnyfat arms and sunken chests, can only carry water for a little while before they have to push their covid mask above their noses and catch a breath.

Check out this real threat to Hollywood. There's a secret to this trailer. See if you can figure out what that secret is.

So here's the secret, which you might not have realized until the credits at the end: That entire trailer is AI-generated. Hollywood is done. The people who did that said the trailer took them a month to make.

Within a few years people will be able to make their own AI movies for the cost of just their own time.

posted by Ace at 05:30 PM

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