Joe Rogan says DOGE should look into how box office bomb 'Snow White' cost $250M
Podcaster Joe Rogan and comedian Kurt Metzger roasted Disney’s new adaptation of "Snow White" as it flounders in theaters.
Since it began production in 2022, Disney's live-action remake of "Snow White" has made headlines due to multiple controversies, including a year-long delay, a debate over how to portray the original fairytale’s "seven dwarfs" after scathing commentary from actor Peter Dinklage and an outspoken lead actress who prompted backlash with her public mockery of the original Disney film and later of supporters of President Donald Trump.
Metzger argued that as much as lead actress Rachel Zegler may have been a bad pick for the film, its failure cannot be blamed entirely on her.
"If you notice the spin on it, they're putting it all on her. I mean, I'm sure she sucks, but she is very young. She didn't write that script though, right? And I don't think she made the ‘no dwarves’ decision, that was Sir Peter Dinklage," Metzger said.
CRITICS SLAM ‘SNOW WHITE’ AS FILM ON TRACK TO BE LOWEST DISNEY LIVE-ACTION REMAKE IN HISTORY
The studio’s remake of the 1937 animated classic has bombed at the box office, earning only $43 million in ticket sales in the U.S. and Canada in its opening weekend, then suffering a 66 percent decline the second week with only $14.2 million domestically.
These numbers appeared all the more catastrophic considering the film had a budget of approximately $250 million — making it one of the company's most expensive film productions in the last several years.
As they spoke about the film’s arduous production process, Rogan played footage of the movie to see how the CGI of the dwarves turned out.
"Oh, wow, that does look bad," Rogan said. "Oh, it doesn’t look real at all."
"Wait, how much did this cost?" the host asked, before sparking laughter as he joked, "They should get DOGE to look at this movie. They spent 250 million bucks making that movie?"
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"Imagine you spent $250 million, and you get some young girl, and you don't kind of talk to her about like, ‘Hey, you know, don't get political. You're young, and I know you have opinions about things, but this should be just about the movie,’" Rogan said.
Metzger said, to be fair to Zegler, her attitude embodies the film's message. "They wrote a script that's telling girls, 'I don't need nobody to tell me, I'm a 20-year-old girl, so obviously I should run my mouth all the time.'"
He suggested that wading into one particularly contentious issue sealed her fate, however.
"So now, they’ve put it all on her, now it failed. Here’s what happened, she made the cardinal error of saying ‘Free Palestine’ on Twitter," Metzger said. "So she could say all that ‘men are bad’ and it's this and that, but once you do that, now they've put the entire weight of the failure upon her."
The film's producer personally got involved with the backlash surrounding Zegler after she shared an anti-Israel post while promoting the film in August, according to his son.
Jonah Platt, the son of producer Marc Platt, slammed Zegler in a now-deleted Instagram post.
"Yeah, my dad, the producer of [an] enormous piece of Disney IP with hundreds of millions of dollars on the line, had to leave his family to fly across the country to reprimand his 20-year-old employee for dragging her personal politics into the middle of promoting the movie for which she signed a multi-million dollar contract to get paid and do publicity for," the younger Platt wrote.