Wake up, Snow White.
Disney‘s latest live-action remake of an animated classic got off to a Sleepy start in its premiere weekend, grossing $43 million at the domestic box office. The global estimate looks much better given Snow White‘s budgeting north of $250 million, with an $87.3 million take from markets in 52 territories.
While the film’s underperformance isn’t altogether surprising given its scandal-ridden production and rollout, it may also not be cause for much concern. There’s precedent for Disney’s live-action remakes getting off to a slow start but ultimately maintaining their box office pace and far outperforming their budgets when the curtain finally drops. The Little Mermaid (2023), for example, opened to $95 million on a nearly identical budget to Snow White, but after 12 weeks had grossed nearly $570 million globally.
With Rachel Zegler in the titular role and Gal Gadot as the Evil Queen, the remake of Walt Disney Pictures’ historical first foray into feature-length animation did pull off another impressive feat in its opening weekend: unseating the Chinese animated mythic epic Ne Zha 2 from its top spot at the global box office, a title it had held the past eight consecutive weeks. That film, based on Xu Zhonglin’s 16th-century novel Investiture of the Gods and directed by Jiaozi, added $15 million at the global box office and now boasts more than $2.1 billion.
At the domestic box office, Snow White was followed by Steven Soderbergh‘s spy caper Black Bag, which took in a meager $4.4 million in its second week of release for a $14.8 million total. Captain America continues to make his country proud in the third spot, with Brave New World adding $4.1 million in its sixth week of release for a $192 million domestic total. Though that barely clears the film’s reported $180 million budget (a number that’s been called into question), the Marvel superhero romp passed $400 million at the global box office this weekend.
In fourth and fifth place domestically are Bong Joon Ho‘s highly-anticipated Parasite follow-up Mickey 17 and the violent Jack Quaid action comedy Novocaine. The former film brought in $3.9 million for a $40.2 million total, and the latter brought in $3.7 million for a $15.7 million total.
Claudette Barius/Focus Features
If there is a tragedy buried somewhere in this weekend’s box office report, it’s Robert De Niro‘s Alto Knights. The mob drama directed by Barry Levinson was budgeted at roughly $45 million and counted De Niro, Debra Messing, and Shōgun breakout Cosmo Jarvis among its cast, but earned the sixth place spot on the domestic leaderboard with a disappointing $3.1 million debut.
Then there’s Magazine Dreams, the bodybuilding biopic that was announced as a major turn from star Jonathan Majors when it premiered at Sundance in 2023. Searchlight Pictures picked the film up and quickly began signaling their intent to market the film straight to a Best Actor nod at the Oscars, but the day after they set a release date, Majors was arrested following an altercation with his then-girlfriend, Grace Jabbari, and later found guilty of assault and harassment. The film opened this week to a stunningly low $700,000, which works out to a meager $859 per theater average across 815 locations.
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The domestic top 10 is rounded out by the Looney Tunes movie The Day the Earth Blew Up, NEON horror The Monkey from Longlegs director Osgood Perkins, DreamWorks animated offering Dog Man, and independently produced Christian film The Last Supper. The global picture isn’t an altogether different one, with Mickey 17, Black Bag, and Brave New World earning the third, fourth, and fifth spots, with $12 million, $7.4 million, and $7.1 million, respectively.
Next weekend brings a diverse assortment of flavors for moviegoers to taste test, from the fantasy comedy Death of a Unicorn, starring Paul Rudd and Jenna Ortega, to Jaume Collet-Serra’s long-awaited return to horror with The Woman in the Yard, to the prosaic literary adaptation The Friend, starring Naomi Watts and a gigantic great dane.