Disney’s latest remake, “Snow White,” arrived in theaters on Thursday night as one of the most snakebit projects in the company’s 102-year history. Almost everything that could have went wrong did, resulting in a torrent of negative prerelease publicity.

Did the tumult have an impact on the box office?

It certainly didn’t help: Based on projections from analysts, “Snow White” will finish the weekend with a saggy $45 million in ticket sales. In the 15 years that Disney has been producing live-action remakes of its animated classics, none of the big-budget entries have arrived in theaters to less than $58 million, after adjusting for inflation. (That was “Dumbo” in 2019.)

“Snow White” was expected to collect an additional $50 million or so overseas this weekend. The movie cost at least $350 million to make and market (on par with “Dumbo” after adjusting for inflation).

Still, “Snow White” is projected to be the No. 1 movie in the United States and Canada over the weekend. It played in 4,200 theaters and gave the struggling movie theater business its second-biggest opening of the year, behind Disney’s “Captain America: Brave New World,” which had $89 million in first-weekend ticket sales.

Among other new releases, the gangster drama “The Alto Knights” (Warner Bros.), which cost roughly $50 million to make, excluding marketing, was on pace to collect a disastrous $3 million from 2,651 theaters. It received weak reviews.

“Magazine Dreams” (Briarcliff), a gritty bodybuilder drama starring Jonathan Majors, was expected to take in about $900,000 from 800 theaters, a result that The Hollywood Reporter called “D.O.A.” Mr. Majors had promoted the film as a comeback vehicle after his career took a hit when he was convicted in 2023 of assaulting and harassing an ex-girlfriend. Reviews were mostly positive.

“Snow White” divided critics and audiences. Reviews were only 44 percent positive, according to Rotten Tomatoes, the review-aggregation site. Among moviegoers, however, “Snow White” did much better: The Rotten Tomatoes “audience score” was 71 percent positive on Saturday.

Latinos made up 25 percent of the audience, which was 68 percent female, according to exit polling cited by analysts.

Based on the 1937 animated classic “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” Disney’s film ran into one problem after another after starting production in 2021. The coronavirus pandemic, the 2023 actors’ strike and extensive reshoots resulted in budget overruns. Disney was criticized by members of the dwarf community for creative decisions involving Grumpy, Bashful, Doc and the gang.

And the film’s outspoken star, Rachel Zegler, who is Latina, became a lightening rod. Internet users (mostly men) and some right-wing media outlets criticized her casting, contending that an actress of Colombian descent had no business playing Snow White, and that Disney’s support of her was an example of Hollywood diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives run amok.

Some of those “go woke, go broke” faultfinders took a victory lap online over the weekend.

But analysts pushed back on that theory, saying “Snow White” most likely struggled at the box office because the underlying intellectual property is old-fashioned. At this point, Disney has remade most of its more recent animated classics and has been forced to move on to less popular properties in its library, including “Lilo & Stitch.” Its live-action version arrives in theaters in May.

Audiences have also started to tire of live-action remakes of animated movies in general, according to analysts, who cite declining returns at the box office. Disney is aware of this trend and has shelved plans to redo “Bambi” (1942), “The Sword in the Stone” (1963) and “Hercules” (1997).

For its part, Universal has a lot riding on its coming live-action remake of “How to Train Your Dragon” (2010).

When movies arrive to disappointing ticket sales, studios always say they are hopeful that word of mouth will lead to a wider audience in the following weeks. In the case of “Snow White,” it may not (just) be spin.

“The success of the film will depend on whether it gets the ‘babysitter effect’” — parents looking for ways to occupy young children — “and plays well for a couple of months like ‘Mufasa’ recently did,” David A. Gross, a box office analyst, said in an email on Saturday. “Disney knows how to support their films, and this corridor, which includes spring breaks, is a good one.”

Nearly 30,000 pounds of ready-to-eat beef sticks were recalled on Thursday after consumers complained that they had found metal fragments in them, food safety and company officials said.

The voluntary recall affects Chomps Original Beef Sticks, but the company said in a statement posted online on Thursday and Friday that it was including Original Turkey sticks and additional product lots that were produced at Idaho Smokehouse Partners, based in Shelley, Idaho.

The Food Safety and Inspection Service, which is under the U.S. Department of Agriculture, said in a statement that the agency was informed of “two consumer complaints reporting that pieces of metal were found in the product.”

The products subject to the recall were packaged at a single facility from Jan. 16 through Jan. 23, according to Chomps. The Food Safety and Inspection Service said that the recalled items were shipped to retail locations in California and Illinois.

The company said the turkey products added to the recall were not included in the 29,541 pounds of recalled beef sticks reported by federal regulators, but it did not provide a weight for the additional items.

There have been no confirmed injuries from consuming the products, the Food Safety and Inspection Service said, adding that anyone who is concerned about an injury should contact a health care provider.

Consumers who purchased the recalled items are urged to throw them away or return them to the store.

Idaho Smokehouse Partners said in a statement on Saturday that after becoming “aware of the two complaints,” it “worked with regulatory authorities on the best way to protect consumers from this issue.”

“We are taking this action because we are committed to the highest food safety standards for the consumers of our products,” the company added.

Chomps said in a statement on Saturday that the decision to recall the items was “made following a thorough investigation conducted alongside our manufacturing partner” and under the oversight of the Agriculture Department.

The company said it “chose to broaden the scope of the recall beyond what was required, ensuring that all product packaged during that time frame was fully accounted for and removed from the market.”

Chomps also said that it had added “further safeguards to prevent this from happening again.”

Since President Trump began his second term in January, no high-level officials from the United States have met with their counterparts in China, even as the world’s two largest economies have taken turns imposing steep tariffs on each other.

In the absence of official meetings, Senator Steve Daines of Montana has cast himself as a go-between. Mr. Daines met with Vice Premier He Lifeng, who oversees many economic issues for China, on Saturday and was set to meet Premier Li Qiang, the country’s second-highest official, on Sunday.

In an interview with The New York Times on Saturday after the meeting with Mr. He, Mr. Daines, a Republican member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said he urged China to take effective action to halt the export of chemical precursors for fentanyl.

“I met with President Trump a few days before I came over, and he was pleased that I was coming to communicate his ‘America First’ message and, importantly, to make sure that Chinese leaders knew the seriousness of the fentanyl issue, and the role that China can play in stopping the shipment of precursors to the Mexican cartels,” Mr. Daines said.

Chinese officials have said that the fentanyl crisis is rooted in an American failure to curb demand for the drug, and that Beijing has taken effective measures to limit shipments of fentanyl and its chemical precursors. China’s cabinet issued a report earlier this month on its fentanyl measures, and Mr. Daines said this was being studied by American officials.

Mr. Daines said he was trying to lay the groundwork for a meeting between President Trump and Xi Jinping, China’s top leader. “This visit is the first step to arrange and set up the next step, which will be a very important meeting between President Xi and President Trump — when that occurs, I don’t know, where it occurs, I don’t know.”

The White House has not named Mr. Daines as acting on its behalf. But Mr. Daines is one of Mr. Trump’s top allies in Congress. He was the first member of the Republican leadership in the Senate to endorse Mr. Trump in 2023 for a second term at a time when many Republican senators were leery of seeing Mr. Trump return to the White House.

“Given Senator Daines’s relationship to Donald Trump, China certainly wants to learn from him about Trump’s China policy intentions — whether he still wants to make a deal with China, and if so, what the deal would look like,” said Wu Xinbo, dean of the Institute of International Studies at Fudan University in Shanghai.

China also wants Senator Daines to “bring a message to Donald Trump that China wants to sit down to talk with the U.S. side and to avoid further escalation of the tensions,” Mr. Wu said.

Mr. Trump has imposed 20 percent tariffs on goods from China and threatened more. China wants to head off further tariffs.

“There’s a window of opportunity before early April for China and the U.S. to engage each other, and Senator Daines’s visit could play a pivotal role,” Mr. Wu said.

Mr. Daines said that he was not focusing on tariffs with China, because the Office of the United States Trade Representative has not yet finished a policy review.

Mr. Trump has said he plans to meet with Mr. Xi, without specifying details. China has said nothing publicly about a meeting. But the contacts between working-level administration officials that typically precede such a meeting have been absent so far during Mr. Trump’s second term.

Mr. Xi makes all important decisions in China, particularly on foreign policy. That makes summits with American presidents particularly important in setting the trajectory of bilateral relations. The two leaders met in 2017 when Mr. Xi went to Mar-a-Lago, in Florida, and Mr. Trump went to China.

The lack of engagement with Washington until now has led some in Beijing to begin to doubt whether Mr. Trump is sincere in his expressed desire to meet Mr. Xi, said Yun Sun, the director of the China program at the Stimson Center in Washington.

“They see him changing his position rapidly on a number of issues,” Ms. Sun said. “That translates into an almost fatalism for the Chinese, that they should aim to prepare for the worst case scenario, that’s their conclusion.”

Mr. Daines said he also expressed concern about China’s barriers to imports, beyond just tariffs, during his visit to Beijing. He declined to provide any specifics. But Montana politicians have long argued that China’s intermittent halts on imports of beef from the state are unfair trade barriers, and not the result of any actual concerns about mad cow disease, as Beijing contends.

Mr. Daines lived for six years in southern China in the 1990s as a project manager for Procter & Gamble, the American consumer products giant.

This weekend’s trip is Mr. Daines’s sixth to China since his election to the Senate in 2014, making him one of the few members of Congress who have continued traveling to the country even as relations have deteriorated.