Weekend Preview: SNOW WHITE to Revive March Box Office Despite Dip in Tracking

The Boxoffice Podium

Forecasting the Top 3 Movies at the Domestic Box Office | March 21 – 23, 2025

Week 12 | March 21 – 23, 2025

1. Snow White
Walt Disney Pictures | NEW
Weekend Range: $45M – $55M
Showtime Market Share: 27%

Pros

• Because Snow White has been tracking down since pre-sales began on Monday of last week, our prediction panel is forecasting an opening around the $50M mark. On the plus side, family audiences that aren’t terminally online probably have little awareness of the PR disaster surrounding the film. Disney films, especially live-action adaptations, aren’t strangers to online culture wars, but that’s rarely been a determining factor financially. Plus, theaters really need a movie like this right now after last weekend posted the weakest frame of 2025 so far. Last year’s Frame 12 had a similar debut of $45M from Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire.

• Snow White doesn’t have any direct competition until WB’s big budget A Minecraft Movie brings its silliness to bear on April 4. This gives the fairest of them all a clear runway to find its audience through the strength of the film itself, not the publicity. With initial critical reactions surprisingly positive, given all the negative media buildup, word-of-mouth referrals are a distinct possibility. Also, let’s not forget that opening weekend is far from the final say for movies like this. Case in point: December’s Mufasa: The Lion King opened to $35M, but the film’s strength and lack of competition into January helped carry it across the $250M threshold domestically. Opening weekend alone won’t provide the full picture of how we should assess Snow White‘s box office performance.

Cons

• It’s safe to say Disney misplayed its hand by not allowing press coverage of the Snow White premieres, turning the PR headaches around the film into the story instead of the film itself. The last time in recent memory a film came in with this level of PR headache was WB’s 2022 thriller Don’t Worry Darling, which got so overshadowed by inside baseball negativity that it never established its own identity as a film. Pre-sales haven’t been kind to Snow White, with some members of our forecasting panel suggesting a potential floor in the high $30M’s this weekend.

If you don’t count sequels/spin-offs or films that went straight to Disney+, there haven’t been as many direct live-action remakes of Disney animated classics to hit the multiplexes as you would think. Here’s how previous entries opened theatrically…

• The Lion King (2019) – $191.77M opening / $543.6M domestic
• Beauty and the Beast (2017) – $174.75M opening / $504M domestic
• Alice in Wonderland (2010) – $116.1M opening / $334.19M domestic
• The Jungle Book (2016) – $103.26M opening / $364M domestic
• The Little Mermaid (2023) – $95.57M / $298.17M domestic
• Aladdin (2019) – $91.5M opening / $355.55M domestic
• Cinderella (2015) – $67.87M opening / $201.15M domestic
• Dumbo (2019) – $45.99M opening / $114.76M domestic
• 101 Dalmatians (1996) – $33.5M opening / $136.18M domestic

While The Lion King and Beauty and the Beast number among the 20 biggest grossers in Disney history (including Lucasfilm, Marvel, and Pixar), others have not exactly set the world on fire. If Snow White opens as low as we expect it to, it will certainly be amid the lower-rung openers on this list.

2. The Alto Knights
Warner Bros. | NEW
Weekend Range: $3M – $5M
Showtime Market Share: 7%

Pros

• Oscar-winning director Barry Levinson reunites with acting legend Robert De Niro for the fifth time on a flashy period gangster saga, an elevator pitch that deserves a significantly higher box office forecast than our figures. The Alto Knights revolves around real-life 1950s mob bosses Vito Genovese and Frank Costello and has been in development for decades, but catches De Niro at just the right age to play the parts without the distracting CGI aging of The Irishman.

Cons

• A lackluster marketing campaign may be to blame for slow tracking on a film of this pedigree. Unfortunately, the film has very little awareness or marketing support and will have difficulty standing out in the market. The freshness factor and older audience counter programming should be enough for Alto Knights to finish second, but it could realistically slide down as far as sixth on the Top 10 chart this weekend. Poor initial reviews (currently 37% on Rotten Tomatoes) might scotch things in a major way. The Boxoffice Company’s Showtimes Dashboard currently lists the film as fourth among all titles in terms of market share.

RACE FOR THIRD:

Novocaine | Paramount | Week 2
Black Bag | Focus Features | Week 2
Mickey 17 | Warner Bros. | Week 3
Weekend Range: $3M – $4M

Pros

• We expect another close race between these three titles for the third spot on the podium. We’re currently giving the edge to Novacaine, which topped last weekend with an $8.8M opening and has the highest concentration of showtimes for the upcoming frame among this trio of titles. An RT audience score of 89% combined with 4 out of 5 stars on PostTrak gives it word of mouth edge over Steven Soderbergh’s well-reviewed Black Bag, which has a lower audience score of 71%. However, Black Bag ($7.6M) did manage to edge out the more divisive Mickey 17 ($7.4M) for second place when actuals came in on Monday, and we believe it should stay ahead this weekend as well.

Cons

• Even though we have Mickey 17 at the bottom of the bunch, it could just as well finish as high as second with the overall weak awareness/appeal of the slate outside of Snow White in this frame.