Tag: Snow White

The Lesson of Supergirl: The audience has a lot of Christian dads in it

I haven’t seen the Supergirl movie yet. From everything I’ve heard and read about the promotional run and the way the numbers have come in, I’m not in any rush. It’s the same old story playing out again, the one that keeps repeating itself in Hollywood these days like a bad loop on an old VHS tape. The actress, Milly Alcock, went out there during the press cycle and made some comments that landed exactly the way these things always do when the people in charge forget who actually buys the tickets. She talked about online critics and how a lot of them were just “Dad of four, Christian” types with no profile picture or burner accounts, and she said it was hilarious to her. Then she added that if you’re pissing off the right kind of people, you’re doing okay. 

That kind of talk might play well in certain rooms in Los Angeles or New York, but it doesn’t play well with the people who were supposed to be the core audience for a big summer superhero movie built around Superman’s cousin. Christian dads with a couple of kids aren’t some fringe group you can mock on the way to the bank. They’re the ones who used to load up the minivan, buy the tickets, get the popcorn, and make these movies cultural events. When you go out of your way to signal that their worldview is a punchline, they notice. And they stay home. Then the box office comes in soft, everybody starts pointing fingers, and the same executives who greenlit the messaging act surprised.

This is the same playbook that wrecked the live-action Snow White over at Disney. Rachel Zegler went out there and called the original story dated, took shots at the prince character, and sprinkled in enough political commentary that a big chunk of the traditional family audience decided they had better things to do with their Saturday afternoon. The movie opened okay but collapsed fast, and Disney ended up losing something like $170 million on it once you factored in the budget, the reshoots after the set fire, and the marketing.  It wasn’t just one actress. It was a whole system that decided the audience needed re-education more than it needed entertainment.

Supergirl opened the weekend of June 26, 2026, to about $37 million domestically. That was well below the $50 million range some trackers were expecting and a steep drop from what Superman did the year before under James Gunn’s watch. Superman opened to $125 million domestically and finished with roughly $355 million here in the States and over $618 million worldwide. Supergirl, with a reported $170 million production budget plus heavy marketing, was tracking toward the low $60s, or maybe $70 million, domestically if it held on through the holiday frame, with worldwide totals hovering around $110-115 million.  That’s not enough to break even on a movie this size. It’s the kind of number that makes everybody downstream from the studio—crew, vendors, theater chains—feel the pain while the people who made the decisions move on to the next project.

The demographic split on opening weekend told the story in real time. The audience was skewed heavily male and over 25. The young women and families the movie was supposed to bring in large numbers didn’t show up in force. That’s what happens when the lead actress spends part of the promotional cycle telling a big slice of the potential audience that their very existence as profile pictures with kids and a faith is funny to her. You don’t have to agree with every dad out there. You don’t even have to like them. But if you’re getting paid millions to stand in front of a camera in a cape and sell a $200 million piece of intellectual property, your job during promo is to get as many people as possible to buy a ticket. Not to litigate culture war points from a Variety interview conducted months earlier. 

I’ve been around this business enough over the years to know how it works. I had a stretch where I thought I might direct or at least write and produce films. I wrote a few things, got them in rooms, and sat across from people who controlled real money. What I saw up close was that a certain faction had already decided the product came second to the politics. I remember one conversation where I pitched something and the response wasn’t about whether the story would connect or make money. It was about whether the script had the right messaging baked in. When I realized the game was rigged that way, I made a decision. I wasn’t going to spend my life compromising on things that mattered to me to get a seat at a table that was already serving a different meal. I walked away from chasing that particular brass ring and put my energy into the Tea Party and then the broader movement that became MAGA. The checks in Hollywood can be big for a minute, but they don’t buy back your integrity once you’ve traded pieces of it away.

That’s why these promotional disasters keep happening. The people in charge keep hiring talent who treat the job as a personal activism platform rather than a professional obligation. Zendaya is the counterexample people should study. She’s a good actress; she’s in big franchises; she married Tom Holland; and she mostly keeps her head down and does the work. She doesn’t feel the need to go out on every carpet and unload on half the country. That’s why she keeps getting hired. The ones who treat every interview like a chance to settle scores or signal to the online choir end up with one big movie and then a lot of quiet time afterward.

James Gunn has been in an interesting spot through all of this. He came in with real goodwill from the Guardians movies, which proved you could take obscure characters, give them personality and humor, and make a fortune. Superman last year was a genuine hit—fun, hopeful, well-reviewed, and profitable. It looked like maybe the new DCU under Gunn and Peter Safran had found a lane. Supergirl was supposed to build on that momentum. Instead, it landed with a thud. Gunn didn’t direct this one—Craig Gillespie did—but he and Safran produced it and shaped the vision. The character on screen is described as more jaded, sarcastic, impulsive, a bit of an anti-hero who parties on red-sun planets where she can actually get drunk. That’s a valid take on the comics, but when you pair it with a promotional tone that mocks the audience that grew up on the classic Superman ideal of truth, justice, and the American way, you’re asking for trouble. 

There’s already talk in the trades about whether this soft opening puts Gunn’s position under more scrutiny. Some agents are whispering that another miss like this and the corporate structure might decide it’s time for a change, even though Superman succeeded and the long-term plan is still being sold as sound.  That’s how it goes in these big studios now. One regime comes in promising to fix the mess left by the last one, spends a fortune on a new slate, and then the same underlying problems—audience alienation, messaging over story, talent who can’t or won’t sell the product—show up again. Gunn has more runs on the board than most, but the Supergirl numbers are a reminder that goodwill has a shelf life when the results don’t follow.

I keep coming back to the Indiana Jones situation because it shows the pattern so clearly. In the last film, there were persistent rumors that the original plan involved killing the character off or erasing him in some way that felt like a deliberate gut punch to the legacy. The director denied reshoots for that specific reason, but a lot of us who watched the sausage get made over the years didn’t buy the full denial. Extra money got spent, the ending got massaged, and the movie still underperformed relative to what an Indiana Jones picture should do. The people in charge wanted to make a statement. The audience wanted one more ride with the character they loved. When those two things collide, the audience usually wins by staying home, and the studio eats the difference.

Captain Marvel followed the same arc. Brie Larson went out and did the whole “toxic masculinity” circuit after the first movie made money. The sequel, The Marvels, became one of the bigger bombs in recent Disney history. The pattern is consistent: the first project coasts on existing goodwill and curiosity, the star or the messaging starts treating the core audience like the enemy, and the follow-up craters. Then the same executives who approved the approach acted shocked that families and longtime fans didn’t line up again.

What’s happening now is bigger than any single movie or actress. Hollywood went hard left years ago, and the corporate layer that runs these places decided DEI checklists and cultural re-education were more important than selling tickets. They hired people who shared that worldview, gave them big platforms, and then acted surprised when the people who actually pay for the content walked away. The trust erosion is real. Once families decide a brand doesn’t have their kids’ best interests at heart—whether it’s live-action remakes that lecture them or kids’ programming that slips in stuff no parent asked for—they don’t come back easily. You see it in the vinyl revival, the return to physical media, people wanting to own their libraries instead of renting everything from a streaming service that can memory-hole a title whenever it wants. We went through this with music. The industry told everybody they’d rent forever from iTunes and Spotify. Now people are buying records again because they want something they can actually hold when the power goes out or when the algorithm decides they shouldn’t hear a certain song anymore.

The same principle applies to movies. These big corporate entities keep treating the audience like a resource to be mined and then scolded. The audience is responding by treating Hollywood as an optional expense rather than a weekly habit. Supergirl didn’t fail because the character is unlikable in the comics or because superhero fatigue is total. It failed because the promotional campaign handed the opposition free ammunition and because the underlying calculation—that you could insult a big chunk of the paying public and still get their money—turned out to be wrong.

I’ve said for years that the best movies, the ones that actually shaped generations, came from people who cared more about the story than the politics of the moment. Star Wars in its original run was a phenomenon because it gave people something to line up for, something to argue about in the schoolyard, something that felt bigger than the daily grind. The merch drops were events. Families participated together. When the machine decided it needed to lecture instead of entertain, the cultural grip loosened. The same thing is happening across the board now. The pushback isn’t coming from some organized cabal. It’s coming from millions of individual decisions by people who are tired of paying premium prices to be told their values are the problem.

James Gunn still has a runway because Superman worked and because he has a track record of making things people actually want to watch. But the Supergirl results are a warning shot. If the next projects keep treating the core audience as something to be managed or mocked rather than served, the DCU experiment will end up in the same pile as every other attempt to force-feed ideology through expensive capes. The audience has options now. They can wait for streaming, skip it entirely, or see something else that doesn’t require them to check their beliefs at the door.

Look, I’m not saying every actor has to be a robot with no opinions. I’ve got plenty of my own, and I’ve never been shy about sharing them on my own platforms. The difference is I built those platforms myself. When you’re handed a lead role in a $170 million studio movie, the job description includes not actively driving away the people who are supposed to fill the seats. That’s not censorship. That’s basic professionalism and basic math. The Christian dads with kids aren’t asking for a sermon from the screen. They’re asking for two hours where the good guys win, the hero stands for something worth standing for, and nobody on the promotional tour calls their existence hilarious. When Hollywood forgets that simple transaction, the box office reminds them. And the reminders are getting more expensive every year.

I’ve watched this industry from the outside for a long time now, close enough to see the decisions but far enough away that I didn’t have to compromise to keep a seat. What I see is a system that keeps choosing the same losing strategy and then acting confused when the results don’t change. The audience didn’t leave because they hate superheroes. They left because the people making the movies began to hate the audience. Until that calculation flips, these soft openings and outright disasters will keep happening. The ones who figure it out first—the ones who treat the job like a privilege instead of a pulpit—will be the ones still standing when the dust settles. The rest will explain to their next meeting why the numbers didn’t work out again.

That’s the reality on the ground in the middle of 2026. Superman proved there’s still an appetite for hopeful, well-made comic book movies. Supergirl proved that even a strong foundation can be undermined in a single promotional cycle when the people involved forget who they’re talking to. The pushback is real; it’s measurable at the ticket window, and it’s not going away until the people writing the checks decide that making money and telling stories people actually want to see matter more than scoring points with the crowd that already agrees with them. I’ve made my peace with walking away from that table years ago. Watching it wobble from a distance confirms I made the right call.

Sources and Further Reading

•  Box office figures and analysis for Supergirl (2026): TheWrap, Box Office Mojo, USA Today, ComicBook.com reports from late June and early July 2026. 

•  Milly Alcock Variety interview comments on critics and “Dad of four, Christian” profiles: Originally conducted mid-April 2026, widely discussed after May publication and post-release. 

•  Snow White (2025) financial losses and promotional controversies: Forbes, Variety, Box Office Mojo. 

•  James Gunn DCU context and insider speculation post-Supergirl: Slashfilm, Screen Daily, ComicBook.com. 

•  Broader industry patterns around audience alienation, DEI priorities, and promotional missteps: Multiple trade coverage 2023–2026 on Captain Marvel/The Marvels, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny rumors and reshoots (director denials notwithstanding), and shifting audience behavior toward physical media and selective viewing.

Rich Hoffman

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About the Author: Rich Hoffman

Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com.  If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.

Why ‘The Chosen’ is Successful and ‘Snow White’ is Not: Understanding basic ecnomics

I am a little bit baffled by some of the fear surrounding the Trump tariffs. What did anybody expect to happen?   While this is a topic in its own right, economic understanding in general appears to be lost entirely on ordinary people; they don’t understand basic concepts, let alone complex ones.  The same mentality also applies to movies.  It’s a different business, but it’s all about generating revenue within an economic system that provides entertainment to people.  This Snow White Disney story is a microcosm of the general global trade understanding.  What was Disney thinking in making that stupid live-action remake?  And spending so much money on it.  You could say the same about trade imbalances that favored China over American imports and exports.  Why did the world make the dumb decisions to push international wealth redistribution, which is unmistakably present in financial transactions?  Incentives for foreign trade versus domestic production have been in place for a long time, and they were costly and detrimental; now someone has to pay for all that foolishness.  Why is that so stunning to people? Surely, they can’t be that stupid?  Yet they are, and in incredible ways.  In the first week of April 2025, the streaming show The Chosen Season 5 was released to theaters and did so well that it came in third at the box office, just behind Snow White.  That says a couple of things: that The Chosen is doing really well, and that Snow White is doing really badly, because these are not apples-to-apples movies.  Snow White has a budget of around $ 300 million, whereas The Chosen is designed to be a streaming show that plays in theaters as a dedication to Easter, giving fans a big-screen experience during the Holiday.  It will have three theatrical releases leading up to the Easter Holiday with a total budget of around $45 million.  The Chosen is monstrously successful on paper, whereas Snow White from Disney is a dismal failure on every measure.

My wife and I like The Chosen show. We’ve watched it on several streaming platforms over the years and look forward to every season, which I think is surprising.  It’s not as if people don’t know the story of Jesus; it’s very well-documented.  However, the director, Dallas Jenkins, and his wife, Amanda, have done a fantastic job with the show, telling the story of Jesus in a way that I have never seen or heard before.  They love the material, and they love each other, and it shows on screen, even on the big screen.  You can see The Chosen’s previous four seasons on Amazon Prime. I’ve also watched it on Roku.  And we liked it so much that we went to the theater to see Season 5, because we enjoy it that much.  There are planned 7 seasons in total, as this Season 5 is leading up to the crucifixion of Christ, and by Season 7, it will be the resurrection and an exploration of what happened in the years following Christ’s death.  The way they are presenting the material is well done.  I think it’s the best television in years, much better than anything else on the big screen or small.  It reminds me of Little House on the Prairie from the 1970s in many ways, with well-told stories that encompass all the things humans genuinely desire from the world, including goodness.  You would think that this would be obvious to more people and that more of these kinds of projects would have been made over the years, but Dallas Jenkins was pretty much ran out of Hollywood, as most faith based filmmakers have been forcing him to take his skills to the smallest venue possible, because he had been rejected from the business in Hollywood.

The Chosen began as a project for one of Dallas Jenkins’ friends, who wanted to create something for his church in St. Louis.  It was essentially a small film project that would be shown on a YouTube-like platform for a tiny audience.  And the project just grew from there, becoming the first season of The Chosen, which was produced on a minimal budget by a large group of people who were passionate about the project.  Nobody was getting rich off this material; they just did it because they loved it.  But ironically, even though everyone thinks they know everything about the life of Jesus and his disciples, The Chosen goes several steps further, and each season has grown in popularity and budget.  Season 5 was pretty big stuff, as much of it takes place on the Second Temple in Jerusalem and deals in great detail with all the politics behind the killing of Jesus in ways that have never been done before on such a scope.  Solomon’s Temple looks fantastic, as does everything else.  It is a stunningly good show with great acting.  A lot is happening with it that has tremendous social value, both politically and personally, and I am pleased with it.  I love seeing stories like this both in front of and behind the camera.  I want the world to have more people in it like Dallas Jenkins and his wife.  They are a good family who want to do good things and have the courage to do them without fear.  And if I had to put investment money behind something, those are the kind of people you want to invest in.  Those who took action early on are now seeing the benefits.

This Chosen project reminds me of the Atlas Shrugged movies from 2010.  People who have read me for a long time remember my involvement in that project.  I wanted to see John Aglialoro succeed in adapting that famous novel into a movie that Hollywood had rejected entirely.  The unions caused all kinds of problems, ensuring that each section of the movie’s releases never featured the same actors, which was brutal.  I thought the movies were pretty good and I talked them up as much as I could.  They tell the story quite well, based on the famous book.  The Chosen is similar in that it took a small budget approach that exceeded expectations in its delivery.  However, where Atlas Shrugged was unable to overcome production difficulties without being a bit resentful in the process, Dallas Jenkins gives viewers of his production no sense of trouble at all.  People can enjoy Jesus bringing the New Testament to life in all its glory on the screen, shot by shot.  Where John Aglialoro struggled to recover his massive investment in making the Atlas movies, The Chosen will likely turn out to be extremely profitable, a message that Hollywood cannot ignore, especially as Mel Gibson enters production on his Resurrection movie.  I tend to think that if Aglialoro had made the Atlas films more like Jenkins’ The Chosen, he would have been a lot more successful.  However, we’re dealing with the Trump years, as opposed to the Obama years, and things are pretty different now than they were then. People have a hunger for goodness that they didn’t have even back then, when they took a lot of things socially for granted.  But now with The Chosen, people are finding themselves again, almost as born-again Christians do.  And it’s showing up at the box office.  It’s not that the box office is failing because people aren’t going to see movies.  They don’t want the kind of movies Hollywood wants to show them, like woke adaptations of Snow White.  They want The Chosen, and those who provide that kind of content will be the ones who make the most money.  It’s not rocket science. 

Rich Hoffman

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Rachel Zegler is Only Part of the Problem: The live action Snow White is a disaster on every level

As I said many times, Disney should have listened.  I wasn’t planning to discuss the new Snow White film, but there is just too much to discuss to ignore.  The Disney stock is never coming back, guys.  Bad decisions lead to failed companies, and Disney has made numerous poor decisions, which it can’t afford.  Sure, out of all the movies released last year, they were the only studio to get a few movies in the billion-dollar club.  But for them these days, as opposed to just a few years ago, their business approach was reckless, and they lost respect for their audience and instead put them in an abusive relationship.  And that is the only thing that can be determined about the horrible decision to cast Rachel Zegler into a live-action remake of the Disney classic, Snow White.  And it pains me to say all this, because I have liked Disney, as a company.  As a vacation destination.  I enjoyed Disney as a company and as a family.  I have wanted nothing more than to see Disney succeed, and my intentions in that direction can be traced back for decades. I have put it in writing.  However, as a large company and an easy target for left-wing politics, they have adopted an extreme political stance, becoming increasingly arrogant, and have inadvertently made people like Rachel Zegler possible.  Zegler is essentially the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of Hollywood actresses, and she has sunk herself with this one before the Snow White remake could even get out of the box with feminist diatribes and anti-Israel messaging in support of Palestinian terrorism.  She is one of the worst members of the radical left, and she didn’t do anything to keep it off people’s minds.  Instead, like an entitled brat, she thought for some reason that she could use her platform to advance her personal beliefs, which at her young age of 23 years old, nobody wants to hear.   What could she possibly know?

Disney spent well more than $300 million on a remake of Snow White that nobody wanted.  It’s a beloved classic that, if you were to remake it, audiences would likely want to see how a cartoon looks in live-action, rather than using live-action to reinterpret classic themes as modern social commentary.  And then to write a script and put it on the screen by committee, the way many studios do these days.  Someone should have pulled Disney aside as a company well before they cast Zegler in the film to play the pure, white Snow White.  There were numerous mistakes made well before the cameras started rolling.  However, Disney, like Zegler, started this process by targeting Rosanne Barr for her political beliefs, and most notably, the actress Gina Carano, who appeared in the Star Wars: The Mandalorian show.  Of course, Rachel Zegler thought she should discuss her radical left-wing politics while doing press for Snow White, as the company itself was promoting that kind of activism.  She’s just a dumb, inexperienced kid, copying the adults around her.  What did she know?  Or what could she be expected to know?  Disney attempted to part ways with Johnny Depp regarding the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, which was a terrible mistake.  Not that Johnny Depp is a good person.  He did call for the killing of President Trump by assassination.  But when it comes to the Hollywood community, most people can agree that he is the character people want to see in any Pirates of the Caribbean movie, and Disney tried to push him out because of the anti-white male stereotypes.  Now that they are in deep financial trouble, they are trying to repair that relationship.  But it’s too late.

The math is obvious: movies like Snow White need to be in the billion-dollar range for box office viability.  However, Snow White only grossed around $43 million in its opening weekend, projecting the film to be a massive loss.  But Rachel Zegler is only part of the problem.  She’s the face of it, and she opened her mouth way too much even a year before the film came out.  Disney re-shot the movie and attempted to address some seriously problematic plot points.  For lots of ridiculous reasons, Disney thinks it needs to reprogram what little girls want to see in a movie, anti-romance stories, and feminist power where the evil witches are made sympathetic, rather than hated.  And that is because these goofy feminists are now running these studios, and they bring their broken politics to these projects and hire a cast that represents their radicalism as if these career movies will hide what’s ruined inside them.  But that’s not what people want to see.  People go to the movies to see hope and a positive reflection of their concerns.  They want to leave a movie feeling good about things, not being lectured to about how they need to change their minds.  Little girls hope that someday they will have a prince who comes and sweeps them off their feet, and that they can produce a nice family and live happily ever after.  The original Snow White was all about love’s first kiss and defeating the evil queen.  Not coming to terms with evil which is ultimately where Disney has fallen short.

There are properties that Disney still owns that are generating a little money, such as the Marvel films, Star Wars, and Avatar, with a few projects on the horizon.  There will still be a few movies here and there that do somewhat well, relative to the rest of the Hollywood industry.  But that is only a shadow of its former self, and once that trust is broken with audiences, it will be lost forever.  There is no way to repair it now.  Disney has made itself an anti-Trump, anti-family entertainment company, and I can say that after just visiting there with my family recently.  I wanted to love the Disney experience.  I had just returned from a week-long trip to Japan and then spent a week with my whole family at Disney World, staying at the wonderful Fort Wilderness resort.  I wanted to like it.  But it was like being in love with a ghost.  The magic had gone from the park; it was obvious to me.  All my kids enjoyed themselves, but to be honest, their favorite part of the entire trip and all the fantastic things we did was the swimming pool at the resort.  I spent a small fortune to give my granddaughter a Disney princess experience, complete with a dress and opportunities at the famous castle, and she thoroughly enjoyed it.  She still talks about it all the time and I spent the money because I wanted her to have a taste of an elevated female experience, as a little girl, of what life might be for her, as opposed to the doubts that are so persistent in little girls worried that they might not be pretty enough, or smart enough to get what they want in life.  Disney’s answer to that is to attack the expectations so that nobody fails.  And that is not what people want, which is why the parks are not as full as they used to be, and why people have stopped seeing Disney movies, are canceling their Disney+ memberships, and are turning to other entertainment options.  Rachel Zegler is a creation of Disney, and their support of people like her is precisely why they are failing now.  And why their stock will never bounce back, which I hate to say.

Rich Hoffman

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