Disney’s Bad Week Gets Worse: FCC Chairman Reveals Impending Investigation

Someday, perhaps, Disney’s prince will come. This week ain’t looking so hot for that, however. Nor the next few weeks.

Fresh off the box-office humiliation of the troubled live-action version of “Snow White” — which opened last week after being beset by delays and social controversies — President Donald Trump’s new Federal Communications Commission head let on this week that he was coming after one of Disney’s subsidiaries.

According to a report Wednesday by the wonk-centric outlet Punchbowl News, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr said “he’s sending a letter to ABC’s parent company, Disney, to probe its diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.”

“He said the company’s DEI initiatives may run afoul of the agency’s equal employment opportunity requirements for licensees,” the outlet reported on Wednesday.

“To all businesses regulated by the FCC, I suggest that they get busy ending their promotion of DEI,” Carr told the outlet.

“Carr told us he wants to be ‘even-handed’ in his approach, but many Democrats and some civil liberties groups say that hasn’t been the case and that Carr is chilling speech,” Punchbowl News reported.

“They point out that while he brought back the complaints against the three networks, he didn’t revive one against Fox.

“When we questioned Carr over the Fox complaint, which was centered on its coverage of the 2020 election, he said it was different from the others. He said there was a public comment period for the Fox complaint while the others were ‘summarily dismissed’ without a record.”

And, while the three legacy networks — CBS, NBC and ABC — may have something to be worried about when it comes to the FCC breathing down their necks, Disney-owned ABC’s suffering compounds the wounds that have been suffered by its parent company over the past few weeks.

The long-awaited — and much-derided — “Snow White” remake, starring Rachel Zegler as the titular character and Gal Gadot as the Evil Queen, thudded at the box office with just $87 million worldwide in its opening weekend. In the United States, that number was only $43 million.

That was still good for No. 1 at the box office (virtually any major release is assured of that spot nowadays), but consider the fact that the movie had a budget that is said to have been in the $240 million to $270 million range.

Factoring in promotion and distribution costs, the general Hollywood math is to multiply a film’s budget by two to get the number it requires to break even at the box office. In this case, given the “Snow White” remake’s protracted development period and the PR nightmares it created, that figure might be even higher.

While family films can have longer legs at the box office, generally speaking, this means that — charitably estimating it — “Snow White” needs just over $390 million more just to recoup Disney’s costs. At this point, the company might have a better chance of getting that money straight from Elon Musk.

The Disney film was in trouble from its production period, particularly with star Zegler talking up its woke aspects and using film promotion as boosterism for her pro-Hamas, anti-Israel politics.

This was doubly problematic when you consider her co-star, Gadot, served in the Israeli Defense Forces, although she had the good sense to leave her opinions of geopolitical conflicts out of promoting a profligately expensive kids’ flick.

While Disney’s live-action remakes of its animated classics are a case study in why you don’t try to wring money out of a series of IPs that show alarmingly diminishing returns, it’s arguably Zegler’s dubious promotion of the film — particularly in repeatedly characterizing her Snow White as the girlbossiest of girlbosses in all of girlbossdom — that doomed it from the start.

There was also the unwise decision to recast the seven dwarves as seven non-dwarfish creatures, only to go back to the drawing board and make them dwarves again. (Or “little people,” whatever.)

Naturally, “insiders” involved in the film are doing the Spider-Man meme and pointing at everyone else but themselves, with numerous sources blaming everything short of Mickey Mouse’s debilitating helium addiction for the film’s box-office failure.

Zegler, unsurprisingly, has come under the most fire — and thanks to her militancy about the political nature of her character and her film promotion, one wonders if she might have helped invite the FCC’s attention. Good work there, if she did.

What’s more, it’s unclear where the silver lining is for Disney. CEO Bob Iger has essentially made it clear that public floggings of the company’s performance will continue until morale improves. Of course, given the pace of layoffs and spinoffs at the House of Mouse, at least it will have fewer disgruntled employees who have to high-ho off to work each day.

While the mouse megacorp seems intent on tamping down on wokeness in its content, it’s more or less just stopping the bleeding, not actively closing the multifarious wounds. Moviegoers and streamers alike are thoroughly indifferent to legacy brands that the company paid obscene sums of money to acquire. like “Star Wars,” Pixar, or Marvel.

And on top of all that, a possible FCC investigation into DEI policies at the company? It’s enough to have the beancounters in the accounting department singing “Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Broke” at a much higher pitch than they were after the weekend when the “Snow White” box office receipts came in.

That’s saying something.

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