Rachel Zegler as Snow White in Snow White (2025), Walt Disney Studios

The budget for The Walt Disney Company’s live-action Snow White film starring Rachel Zegler and Gal Gadot is rumored to have exploded to over half a billion.

SNOW WHITE – © 2024 Disney Enterprises, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

In a recent video upload, of which this author appeared, WDW Pro shared, “I am told there have been three reshoots of this film and that Disney is now still working to fix the thing.”

He added, “And in particular there are two areas that Disney is working to resolve before its release in March, which is just a few months away.”

From there, WDW Pro shared two of the major problems that Disney is attempting to fix. First, he noted that “the dwarfs have been roundly mocked and they have been mocked at the level of the original Sonic the Hedgehog model in that film. Of course, Sega and Paramount went back to work and redid the entire model, redid the entire film to make the character look like it does in the video games. With this one they’re not going to have that much time to do everything that needs to be done and they have seven models that need to be adjusted.”

“And the other thing is apparently they’re going to try to adjust the color palette, the atmospherics of the movie to make it brighter and more light-hearted and make it more child friendly. It was deemed a little too dark,” he added.

Rachel Zegler as Snow White in Disney’s live-action SNOW WHITE. Photo courtesy of Disney. © 2024 Disney Enterprises Inc. All Rights Reserved.

WDW Pro then declared, “The big story about all of this is that Disney apparently is trying to get this movie ready to go on the cheap. And the reason that it might be done on the cheap is because they’ve already done three reshoots. We know that this film had a budget that was somewhere around $300 million. They have overshot that significantly according to my source and this film is now heading towards for The Force Awakens and The Rise of Palpatine — That’s what I’m going to call it — kind of budget.”

“We’re nearing the half billion dollar mark according to the source,” he shared.

(L-R): Gal Gadot as the Evil Queen and Rachel Zegler as Snow White in Disney’s live-action SNOW WHITE. Photo courtesy of Disney. © 2024 Disney Enterprises Inc. All Rights Reserved.

READ: Actress Terra Jolé Blasts Disney Over ‘Snow White’ And Reveals Apple TV+ Originally Planned To Cast Dwarves For ‘Time Bandits’ But Changed Course After Peter Dinklage Criticized ‘Snow White’

This rumor has some significant validity to it given Caroline Reid at Forbes reported that Disney’s production company in the United Kingdom working on Snow White had already spent $209.3 million over three years as of July 2022.

It has been over two years since that report and we know of at least one confirmed reshoot from Gal Gadot. She posted a photo of an actor’s chair to her Instagram Stories in June 2024 writing, “Feels good to be back!”

Photo of actor’s chair from Snow White via Gal Gadot Instagram

Not only did the film undergo at least one confirmed reshoot, but as WDW Pro noted the film appeared to radically change how it was going to depict the seven dwarfs. Based on set photos leaked by the Daily Mail it appeared the company was completely doing away with them.

However, following significant pushback, Disney released a photo depicting the dwarfs as CGI creations.

Is Disney planning to reshoot the film because we literally went from ambiguous magical persons back to seven dwarfs.

Did Disney come to their senses? #SnowWhite pic.twitter.com/yODtDUlL9Y

— Vince Salerno (@Thebigv75) October 27, 2023

In fact, the film had received criticism from actor Peter Dinklage during an appearance on the WTF with Marc Maron podcast back in 2022.

He said at the time, “Well, you know, it’s really progressive to cast a— literally no offense to anyone, but I was a little taken aback by — they’re very proud to cast a Latina actress as Snow White. But you’re still telling the story of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs so.”

“Take a step back and look at what you’re doing there,” he continued. “It makes no sense to me. Because you’re progressive in one way but you’re still making that f*****g backward story of the seven dwarfs living in a cave. What the f*** are you doing, man?”

Peter Dinklage as Tyrion Lannister in Game of Thrones (2019), HBO

“Have I done nothing to advance the cause from my soapbox? I guess I’m not loud enough,” he said.

He then concluded, “I don’t know what studio that is. But they were so proud of that. And all love and respect to the actress and to the people who thought they were doing the right thing, but I’m just like, ‘What are you doing?’”

Later in the podcast, he added, “If you tell the story of Snow White and it’s most f***ed up cool, progressive spin on it? Let’s do it. All in. But I just don’t know.”

Peter Dinklage via The Graham Norton Show YouTube

In response to Dinklage’s comments, a spokesman for Walt Disney Company told The Hollywood Reporter, “To avoid reinforcing stereotypes from the original animated film, we are taking a different approach with these seven characters and have been consulting with members of the dwarfism community.”

“We look forward to sharing more as the film heads into production after a lengthy development period,” the spokesman added.

The Hollywood Reporter also asserted, “The film has been in development for three years; the studio has been reimagining the dwarf characters since the earliest stages.”

Rachel Zegler as Snow White in Snow White (2025), Walt Disney Studios

What do you make of this rumor that the budget for this film has increased to over half a billion dollars?