UK Filings Put Disney’s Snow White Overrun on the Books

A Disney UK company filed accounts on 22 December 2025 that put the live-action Snow White remake at $336.5 million in costs. Hidden Heart Productions is the Hammersmith film unit created so the picture could claim British tax relief. A $64.9 million UK credit cut the net bill to $271.6 million.

The movie left theaters with $205.7 million in worldwide ticket sales. On a standard half-share for the studio, that leaves a $168.7 million hole on production alone, before marketing is counted and before home video is added back.

Hidden Heart Productions and the $336.5 Million Cost

US studios fold many movies into one pile of spending. A film shot in Britain is different, because the tax credit requires a single film production company that carries the whole job. That company has to file legally binding accounts. Those pages are how the Snow White number left Burbank.

Hidden Heart Productions Limited, company 12085529, was incorporated on 4 July 2019. Its registered office is c/o Banner Productions Limited at 3 Queen Caroline Street, Hammersmith. The name nods to the heart-shaped latch on the Evil Queen’s jewelry box in the 1937 cartoon. Nature of business: motion picture production.

Entertainment-finance researcher Caroline Reid, who reads these UK production accounts, matched the code name to the remake and pulled the year to 31 December 2024. That cutoff sits less than three months before opening night, so the file is close to a finished cost, not a mid-shoot snapshot. The full accounts to 31 December 2024 went in on 22 December 2025, 23 pages. They state the picture “was forecasted to be over the production budget,” with costs of $336.5 million (£271.1 million).

That outlay sits above Disney’s spend on several films that actually worked, including the live-action Beauty and the Beast, which took $1.3 billion in 2017. Analyst Valliant Renegade had already put the remake at about $300 million in 2023. The filed figure rounds to the same neighborhood. Reid is careful on language here. Cost is what was spent. Budget is what Disney meant to spend. Net expenses are cost minus the UK credit.

A British Tax Credit Bought the Public the Books

Hollywood did not publish this bill as a favor. It published it because Britain pays studios to shoot there, and the price of that payment is a full set of accounts. Reid describes the Audio-Visual Expenditure Credit as a cash reimbursement of up to 25.5 percent of qualifying UK spend. Snow White started cameras in 2022, so it also sits inside the older Film Tax Relief rules that still cover pictures whose principal photography began on or before 31 March 2025.

HMRC’s guidance is blunt about who may claim. The company must run pre-production, the shoot, post-production, and delivery. It must be the one that negotiates and pays. There can be only one such company on a film, which is why the costs cannot be parked in a quieter subsidiary. To qualify, the picture also needs a British Film Institute cultural certificate and theatrical intent, and at least 10% of the core costs have to relate to work in the UK.

WHAT THE UK CREDIT REQUIRES

• One company: A single UK film production company must handle the shoot, the edit, and delivery of the finished film.
• British certificate: The BFI has to certify the picture as British under the cultural test, or it must qualify as a treaty co-production.
• UK floor: At least 10 percent of core costs (pre-production, photography, and post) must be UK activity.
• Open books: The company files accounts that show headcount, social-security costs, the credit received, and the production’s full spend, not only the British slice.

On Snow White, that credit came to $64.9 million (£52.3 million). Subtract it and Disney’s net production bill is $271.6 million. British taxpayers therefore paid a substantial share of a movie that then sold $15.7 million of tickets in the United Kingdom. The same rules that sent cash to Hammersmith are the rules that let anyone with a Companies House login see the overrun.

Pinewood Fire, Reshoots, and a Budget That Did Not Hold

The accounts did not jump to $336.5 million in one season. Spend was heavy before a paying audience existed, and the production kept adding bills after the cameras first wrapped.

THE COST CALENDAR INSIDE HIDDEN HEART

1. 4 July 2019: Hidden Heart Productions Limited is incorporated in England and Wales as Disney’s UK vehicle for the remake.
2. 15 March 2022: A fire hits the Richard Attenborough stage at Pinewood Studios while a wooded set is still going up. Buckinghamshire Fire and Rescue sends 12 appliances. No one is hurt. Disney says no filming is underway.
3. March to July 2022: Principal photography runs in the United Kingdom. Marc Webb directs. Rachel Zegler plays Snow White. Gal Gadot plays the Evil Queen.
4. 31 July 2022: Cumulative spend already stands at $183.3 million, with principal photography only just wrapped.
5. 31 December 2023: Cumulative spend reaches $269.4 million. The company records that the film is forecast to be over budget.
6. June 2024: Disney, unhappy with the first cut, orders reshoots in London.
7. 21 March 2025: The film opens in the United States (wide on 4,200 screens) after a 19 March start in several overseas markets. Runtime is 1 hour 49 minutes. Rating is PG.
8. 22 December 2025: Full accounts to 31 December 2024 are filed, showing $336.5 million of costs and a $64.9 million UK credit.

A pine-set fire and a year of extra shooting do not, by themselves, explain a weak opening. They do explain why a live-action fairy tale was carrying blockbuster costs before the first trailer landed. By the time the public row over Zegler’s comments and the computer-generated dwarfs took over the conversation, Hidden Heart had already booked nine figures.

Title star Rachel Zegler had called the 1937 prince’s behaviour that of a “stalker” and called the cartoon “extremely dated when it comes to the ideas of women being in roles of power.” David Hand, whose father worked on the original, said the elder Disney artists “would be turning in their graves.” Producer Marc Platt’s son, Jonah Platt, later wrote that she had “hijacked the conversation” at the expense of the crew. That fight is what most people still remember. It is not what the Hammersmith filing is about.

How the $168.7 Million Theatrical Gap Was Calculated

Box Office Mojo’s final tape is a $205,679,463 worldwide box office, split $87,203,963 domestic (42.4 percent) and $118,475,500 international (57.6 percent). The domestic opening was $42,206,415. The global opening was $87.3 million, 13 percent under the studio’s own forecast. Among 2025 worldwide releases, the title finished 29th, behind Disney’s own Lilo & Stitch, Zootopia 2, and Avatar: Fire and Ash.

Theaters do not send that $205.7 million back to Burbank. Film consultant Stephen Follows, after interviewing 1,235 industry professionals in 2014, found that studios say theaters keep 49 percent on average. Reid applies the trade’s usual 50-50 split to Snow White and gives Disney $102.9 million. Subtract that rent from the $271.6 million net cost and the theatrical gap is $168.7 million.

SNOW WHITE MONEY, FILING TO TICKET SPLIT

That gap is production versus rentals. It is not a full profit-and-loss. Marketing sits on the studio, not on Hidden Heart, so it is missing from the 23 pages. Residuals sit off those pages too. An earlier Snow White loss account used the same filing arithmetic. The $168.7 million figure is the one the accounts can support without guessing at posters, spots, and toys.

Among Disney’s 21 live-action theatrical remakes of its cartoons, Reid ranks Snow White fifth from the bottom, ahead of only Mulan, 102 Dalmatians, Christopher Robin, and the 1994 Jungle Book. Mulan opened in a pandemic. Adjust 102 Dalmatians’ $183.6 million from 2000 and it is $343.3 million in today’s money. Christopher Robin’s inflation-adjusted take is $253.5 million. For a non-crisis year, you have to go back to 1994 to find a Disney remake that sold fewer tickets.

$1 Billion for Lilo, $100 Million to Make It

Two months after Snow White opened, Disney released another live-action remake and the comparison is ugly for the princess. Lilo & Stitch, out 23 May 2025, grossed $1,038,027,526 worldwide ($423,778,855 domestic, $614,248,671 international) against a $100 million production budget. It did $146 million in its three-day opening and $182.6 million across the four-day Memorial Day weekend.

Reid notes that Lilo became the fourth-highest-grossing adaptation of a Disney cartoon and went a long way toward covering Snow White’s hole. The point for the remake factory is narrower. A cheaper film with a creature audiences already loved printed a billion dollars. The $336.5 million Snow White, built as a rebellion story with a new prince named Jonathan (Andrew Burnap) and a CGI dwarf band, did not.

THREE DISNEY REMAKES, THREE BILLS

Disney paused another live-action princess remake after Snow White’s opening, then brought that shoot back once Lilo landed. The studio did not abandon the vault. It kept spending. It just stopped pretending every classic could carry a $300 million envelope.

Moana Hit the Same Wall in July 2026

Live-action Moana opened 10 July 2026, 16 months after Snow White, on a $250 million budget. The domestic debut was about $43 million, in the same basement as Snow White’s $42.2 million. The worldwide total is $315,373,086 ($126,077,778 domestic, $189,295,308 international). That is more tickets than Snow White sold, and it is still a miss against a quarter-billion production budget, before advertising.

The 2016 Moana cartoon had taken more than $643 million, and the 2024 animated sequel had cleared $1 billion. The live-action version arrived a decade after the first film, the shortest gap Disney has left between a cartoon and its remake. Lilo had waited 23 years. Snow White had waited 88. A short wait and a fat budget produced the same kind of math Hidden Heart had already put on paper.

On X, the Snow White filing is still used as a punchline about “woke” movies, often next to Moana as proof the audience is “done” with remakes. That reading skips Lilo’s billion and skips the cost column. The pattern in the three rows above is simpler. When Disney keeps the bill near $100 million and leans on a character people already buy in plush form, the remake prints money. When the bill is $250 million or $336.5 million, ticket sales in the low-to-mid hundreds of millions are a loss, politics aside.

Snow White’s second weekend fell 66 percent, a collapse that usually means word of mouth died in 48 hours. Moana’s problem was the opposite of scarcity: the songs were already everywhere, the sequel was recent, and a $250 million live-action copy had little new to sell. Different failures. Same expensive habit.

What the UK Company Books Still Omit

Hidden Heart’s file is a production ledger, not Disney’s full recap on the title. A Disney spokesperson, speaking in 2023 about a different UK filing, said there would be other income such as disc sales and merchandising, and that production accounts are not a true record of whether a film was profitable overall. The same logic runs in reverse. If you add toys and streaming, you also have to add the marketing campaign that those 23 pages never show.

WHAT WE KNOW

• Filed cost: $336.5 million of production spend through 31 December 2024, with a $64.9 million UK credit and a $271.6 million net bill.
• Ticket tape: $205,679,463 worldwide, a $102.9 million studio share at a 50-50 split, and a $168.7 million theatrical gap on production.
• Shoot record: UK photography in 2022, a Pinewood stage fire on 15 March 2022, and reshoots in June 2024 after Disney rejected the first cut.

WHAT IS UNCONFIRMED

• Marketing: Global prints and advertising are not in the Hidden Heart accounts, so any all-in loss number above $168.7 million is an estimate, not a filing.
• Ancillary: Disc, streaming, and merchandise receipts sit at the studio. No public line item shows how much, if any, they closed.
• Late bills: The 2024 accounts stop three months before release. Post-opening costs may still land in the next file.

The public argument never caught up with that ledger. Replies under the biggest posts still name the lead, the queen, and the script. They do not name Hidden Heart, the 10 percent UK-cost test, or the $64.9 million credit. The overlooked party is the British taxpayer who helped pay for a movie that then sold weakly in Britain, and the overlooked document is the 23-page return that made the overrun visible at all.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who Owns Hidden Heart Productions Limited?

Banner Productions Limited, a UK Disney company registered as 5417679, is the person with significant control. It holds 75 percent or more of the shares and voting rights and can appoint or remove directors. Active directors include Tracy Anne Bermingham, appointed 22 June 2021, and Chakira Teneya Hunter Gavazzi, a Burbank-based Disney officer appointed the same day.

What Payable Rate Does UK Film Tax Relief Use?

If the production company makes a loss, some or all of that loss can be surrendered for a payable tax credit at 25 percent. The extra deduction used to create or increase that loss is the lower of 80 percent of total core costs or the amount of UK core costs. Claims sit on the company tax return, with a BFI certificate and a split of UK and non-UK core costs attached.

How Much Did Snow White Gross in the United Kingdom?

The UK take was $15,680,929, with a $4,974,727 opening, the largest single overseas market on the Box Office Mojo schedule. France followed at $9,439,394 and Italy at $7,811,986. Mexico led Latin America at $9,042,989.

How Much Did the Film Make in China?

China contributed $1,282,978, with an $883,195 opening on 21 March 2025. For a Disney princess title that is a rounding error, and it is one reason the international share, 57.6 percent of the global total, still could not lift the film out of a production hole.

When Does Film Tax Relief Close?

You cannot claim Film Tax Relief for productions that start principal photography after 31 March 2025. The relief closes for all remaining productions from 1 April 2027. Newer shoots are pushed onto the Audio-Visual Expenditure Credit, which is the scheme Reid cites when she describes reimbursements of up to 25.5 percent of UK spend.

Hidden Heart’s next full accounts, for the year to 31 December 2025, are due at Companies House by 30 September 2026. Those pages will show whether any bills dated after the December 2024 cutoff, including the last stretch into opening week, added still more to a cost the UK credit had already failed to hide.