The Real Cost Of The Rachel Zegler Fallout

Christian Bale pulled a Rachel Zegler before anyone knew the young actress’ name.

Everyone recalled Bale’s work from the “Dark Knight” trilogy, so when director Ridley Scott cast him in 2014’s “Exodus: Gods and Kings” it mattered. Who wouldn’t want the Oscar winner in their next project?

Then Bale dubbed Moses a “terrorist” in publicity interviews for the film.

“If you’re not religious, you can look at it as one man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist,” he said of Moses.

Fred Lee/Walt Disney Television via Getty Images

Religious audiences, otherwise curious to see a movie featuring Moses, weren’t amused. The film, despite the talents of Scott and Bale, tanked.

Sound familiar?

By now, everyone knows how Zegler helped crush Disney’s “Snow White” at the box office. She’s not alone, though.

Stars routinely damage their own projects with ill-advised comments. That mostly involves stars getting hyper-political on publicity tours, stoking partisan rage. Many movie goers refuse to see movies made by two-time Oscar winner Sean Penn, for example, due to decades of charged comments.

Just look at Robert De Niro. He has spent nearly a decade savaging President Donald Trump from every available platform. His latest film, “The Alto Knights,” opened to a disastrous $3.1 million despite his gravitas in gangster movies and tackling not one but two mobster roles in the film.

Was it something he said? It can’t be ruled out.

The Zegler fallout, though, is different. And it could be the final warning for stars to heed when they talk to the press moving forward. Anger potential fans at your peril.

Rodin Eckenroth/Getty Images for Disney

“Snow White’s” slow-moving car crash began two years ago when Zegler trashed the iconic source material on the red carpet.

“I just mean that it’s no longer 1937 … We absolutely wrote a ‘Snow White’ that … she’s not going to be saved by the prince, and she’s not going to be dreaming about true love; she’s going to be dreaming about becoming the leader she knows she can be and that her late father told her that she could be if she was fearless, fair, brave and true.”

The Walt Disney Company via Getty Images. Rachel Zegler, Gal Gadot.

A separate interview found her mocking the story’s male hero, the prince who saves Snow White with a kiss.

“Weird,” she infamously called him, reframing his affection as a “stalker.”

“It’s really not about the love story at all, which is really, really wonderful.”

Tell that to adults who grew up adoring “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” the 1937 animated film that helped launch Disney into the pop culture stratosphere. Chances are they introduced the classic story to their children and grandchildren.

That’s the opposite of weird.

Zegler opened her mouth and inserted both feet. Enter an army of YouTube personalities who ran with Zegler’s quotes.

Had she opined in the past, the quotes would have circulated in the press and faded to black. In our digital age, they only got more attention as the months wore on. It got worse when she started braying, “Free Palestine” on social media, another deeply divisive message.

It didn’t help that her co-star, Gal Gadot, is Israeli and served in the IDF.

Then, before the film’s belated March 2025 opening, Zegler raged against President Donald Trump and, more specifically, his supporters. She hoped they would “never know peace.”

Now, we’re seeing the fruits of her warped words. “Snow White” opened to a dreadful $43 million at the U.S. box office, the worst showing to date for a Disney live-action update. The film had other issues, like Disney disavowing dwarfs as problematic before backpedaling and adding CGI little people.

Zegler’s comments made the most noise, to the film’s detriment.

It’s not enough that Zegler helped sink her own film. The industry called her out for doing just that. Variety ran an exhaustive autopsy on the film’s failure, letting anonymous Disney sources trash the young star. An executive from a different studio also chimed in, “You can’t say that a live-action remake of the most iconic film in the vault that cost [$270] million and has been reshot multiple times opening to $50 million is OK. The math does not work.”

Media outlets couldn’t hide how damaging her comments had been to the film’s box office potential, even though reporters have yet to connect De Niro’s box office tailspin to his anti-Trump diatribes.

Raymond Hall/GC Images

Even Jonah Platt, son of “Snow White” producer Marc Platt, weighed in against Zegler.

“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 … This is called adult responsibility and accountability. And her actions clearly hurt the film’s box office.”

Those Platt quotes also got magnified by legacy media outlets.

Will the Zegler Effect change Hollywood? It could.

Hollywood can’t afford more “Snow White” debacles. The box office is down, again, this year, and 2024’s numbers suggest pre-pandemic levels of movie going may be gone with the wind.

We’ll never go back to the Golden Age of Hollywood where the studios controlled what the actors could and couldn’t say. No one wants or encourages that level of control.

Still, it doesn’t take years of media training to understand a simple policy. Don’t alienate potential audiences when promoting your film or TV show. That shouldn’t be complicated, but apparently it is for some stars.

The Zegler fallout may make some actors think twice before trashing their own films or the people they need to watch them.

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Christian Toto is an award-winning journalist, movie critic and editor of HollywoodInToto.com. He previously served as associate editor with Breitbart News’ Big Hollywood. Follow him at HollywoodInToto.com.

The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.