How much did Rachel Zegler contribute to Snow White's abysmal box office performance?

After topping the box office in its first week against limited competition, Disney's divisive Snow White remake dropped precipitously in second week revenue by 66% and into second place at the weekly box office behind A Working Man.

The decline in fact set a record for worst second week performance for a Disney movie, and against an estimated budget of $250,000,000 looks set to seal its fate as another expensive flop for Disney.

At the centre of the media storm currently surrounding the movie is its star, Rachel Zegler, who throughout the process has made numerous controversial statements, both related to the film and political in nature. There are even at this stage unsubstantiated rumours that Disney are planning to cut ties with Zegler altogether given their difficulties in managing her.

But just how much of the blame for the film’s abysmal performance can be realistically levelled at Zegler, given the already wide-ranging criticism the movie was attracting?

Disney it seemed, even without factoring in Zegler’s actions managed to create the perfect recipe of box office failure.

Firstly, a heavily adapted storyline with any charm and appeal the original had replaced with a predictable female empowerment story, centred around the titular character driven not by love but by a desire to become a good leader. Not exactly an original idea at this stage, and could have been done much better than it was.

Secondly the use of horrific CGI monstrosities as the ‘miners’ instead of using actors. It’s almost as if Disney baulked at the idea of portraying dwarf actors as dated caricatures but somehow thought that artificially generated dwarves were absolutely fine. Then running with this idea the designers were told to push every potentially problematic characteristic to the maximal limit. From a company so often accused of wokeism a disastrous gaff from Disney on that one, managing very likely to offend all sides of the political spectrum.

But undoubtedly the main issue with the film was that it was just plain bad. Politics aside, casting aside, controversy aside, the film received a widespread panning from every critic of note. Poor writing, a tired and predictable storyline and soulless CGI doing more damage than any amount of bad press might have.

Then to top it all off we have Rachel Zegler’s conduct both before and after the release of the film, with truly moronic comments including the following:

“May Trump supporters … and Trump himself never know peace.”

“There is also a deep, deep sickness in this country that is shown in the sheer amount of people who showed up for this man who threatens our democracy,”

“Fuck Donald Trump.”

That’s about half the population of the United States alienated, great work! And of course lots of people think these things, but choosing to voice these stances while promoting a family movie really does show a complete lack of judgement.

“And always remember, free Palestine”

Followed, after the release of the first Snow White trailer, another needless and inflammatory statement, especially given that her co star Gal Gadot is Israeli and received increased death threats as a result.

"People are making these jokes about ours being the PC Snow White, where it's like, yeah, it is - because it needed that."

All undoubtedly comments bound to offend large sections of the potential customer base of the film. Disney in fact at one point sent the producer of the film Marc Platt to New York to speak to Zegler directly in an attempt to curb her comments, seemingly to no avail.

In conclusion then it would appear Rachel Zegler’s actions and perhaps unwitting career suicide helped smother any chance of Snow White being a success. If the movie were a car careering towards a cliff without brakes, Zegler certainly had her foot to the floor accelerating the process. But even without her assistance Snow White was probably doomed from the start, and while she is culpable, there are plenty of others involved in the process just as liable for its failure.