The original Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs helped build Disney. Its success helped finance the company's Burbank studio. The 2025 remake carried an estimated $410 million in total expenses and earned approximately $205.7 million in worldwide ticket sales, only part of which returned to Disney. Associated Press, reported cost breakdown, Box Office Mojo
One film helped finance the future of a studio. The other was an expensive commercial failure built around that film's name.
The original's enduring appeal is also reflected in its cumulative earnings. Across its original release and subsequent theatrical rereleases, Guinness World Records puts its domestic box-office earnings at approximately $1.55 billion, adjusted to November 2021 values. That figure covers decades of releases and is not a direct comparison with the remake's single theatrical run. Guinness World Records
Disney could explain why Snow White needed modernising. It could not make audiences buy tickets.
An expensive correction
The remake's costs deserve more attention than a passing reference to its production budget.
Deadline's financial estimate comprised approximately $270 million in net production costs, $111 million in global marketing and $29 million in residuals and other expenses. The resulting $410 million estimate was substantially larger than the production figure commonly quoted in isolation. Cost breakdown
Later reporting based on the production company's filings put spending through December 2024 at $336.5 million before UK reimbursements, or $271.6 million after them. That period encompassed the reshoots; their cost should not be added again. Marketing sat outside those production accounts. Forbes
The $410 million figure is an industry estimate, not a final audited statement of every expense. Nor can the film's lifetime loss be calculated by simply subtracting its box-office gross: Disney receives other revenue, including home entertainment and television income.
But none of that changes the central fact. This was a hugely expensive attempt to renew a beloved property, and its theatrical audience was nowhere near sufficient to recover that investment.
The question is what Disney thought it was improving.
First, make the prince a problem
During the publicity preceding the remake, Rachel Zegler described the original romantic interest as a man who “literally stalks her”. She also contrasted the new heroine's leadership aspirations with dreaming about true love. Reporting on the promotional interviews
These were an actor's remarks, rather than a formal statement of Disney policy. But they helped frame the production for its audience: the old romance was suspect, and the heroine required more modern ambitions.
An adaptation can develop a character and deepen a relationship. Calling the prince a stalker does something else. It reclassifies a romantic figure as a threat and turns a familiar element of the story into an embarrassment.
Audiences who loved the original were effectively being asked to welcome a remake promoted through criticism of something they valued.
That is an extraordinary way to sell nostalgia.
The prince disappears, but his function survives
The 2025 film replaces the prince with Jonathan, a bandit played by Andrew Burnap. Snow White's ambitions expand towards reclaiming her kingdom. Associated Press review
Yet Jonathan remains a romantic partner, and his kiss awakens her from the enchanted sleep. The remake spends more time establishing their relationship before that moment. Discussion of the relationship and ending
The prince was therefore “killed” as a character and replaced, rather than romance or rescue being removed altogether.
The finished film retained love, attachment and male assistance, despite publicity that presented the original romantic framing as outdated. It delivered them through a replacement character after the original romantic figure had been talked down.
If the relationship could be developed, why frame its foundations as something to outgrow?
When empowerment becomes a hierarchy
Zegler later clarified that she believed women could pursue love alongside other ambitions. In a 2024 Variety interview, she explained that romance had always remained integral and rejected a forced choice between work, love and family. Variety interview
That clarification exposes how unnecessary the earlier contrast was.
A heroine can want love and exercise leadership. There is no need to establish one aspiration's superiority over the other.
Yet this is where the politics of modernisation can become restrictive. The woman who wants romance is regarded as outdated; the woman who seeks authority becomes evidence of progress. Receiving help becomes something to explain away. Independence becomes a test of worth.
That is the identity-politics framework this article challenges: assessing characters principally by whether their roles deliver an approved statement about men and women. It is an interpretation of the promotional framing and creative changes, rather than a claim to know every filmmaker's private motives.
A woman does not become more valuable because her ambitions are public rather than personal. A loving relationship is not a lesser aspiration than a throne.
Why men have a stake in this
For men, the issue extends beyond defending a fictional prince.
If female empowerment is measured by how little women need men, positive male contributions become awkward. Protection can be interpreted as an infringement of agency. Devotion becomes suspect. Rescue risks being treated as an insult to the person rescued.
A man's willingness to love, help and protect another person deserves recognition as a positive contribution. It should not become a narrative liability because the person benefiting is a woman.
Men need not always be rescuers. Women need not always be rescued. But expanding the range of their roles should preserve the possibility that they can love, help and rely on one another.
The remake itself retains that possibility through Jonathan. A male contribution does not prevent Snow White from acting courageously or taking responsibility.
It was never necessary to diminish the prince's place in the story to establish that women matter.
If you want another fairy tale, write one
Adaptations are allowed to change. No filmmaker owes an audience a frame-by-frame reproduction.
But a classic's name carries more than commercial recognition. It carries expectations about characters, relationships, atmosphere and emotional meaning.
Disney benefits from those expectations when it chooses Snow White over an original title. Audiences are entitled to ask whether it has respected the attachment it is trying to monetise.
Someone can value the original romance without opposing female leadership. Someone can prefer the prince without believing every woman must wait for a man. Affection for an older story is not automatically a social failing.
If a story's defining elements repeatedly conflict with the message a studio wants to deliver, there is an obvious alternative: create a different story.
Write the ambitious heroine. Develop her kingdom. Give her new companions and a different romance. Let that film earn its own audience.
What deserves criticism is borrowing a classic's reputation while treating its identity as an obstacle.
Audiences were not obliged to agree
Disney's expensive reinvention failed to attract the audience it needed. The box-office figures establish the commercial result; they do not isolate the reasons.
Audiences voted with their feet. A famous name and a promise of modernisation were insufficient to make this production a theatrical success.
The film still contains kindness, empathy and romance, as favourable reviews acknowledge. Those surviving qualities show that the old story's emotional foundations remained useful. Common Sense Media review
The original, meanwhile, has not been erased. Its achievement survives this remake. What has been damaged is confidence that Disney understands why the film endured.
The studio inherited a story whose success helped build its future. It spent hundreds of millions revisiting it, replaced its prince, and allowed its publicity to cast doubt on the romance at its heart.
A strong woman does not require an obsolete man.
And a beloved classic deserves more than an expensive correction from people selling tickets on the strength of its name.