Tag: Snow White

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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