It was more of a “ho-hum” than a “heigh-ho” at the box office this weekend, as Walt Disney Co.’s latest live-action remake “Snow White” arrived in theaters.

The movie, which stars Rachel Zegler as the titular princess and Gal Gadot as the Evil Queen, opened in the U.S. and Canada to a lackluster $43 million in ticket sales, landing it in first place at the domestic box office, according to studio estimates. Prior to its release, “Snow White” was expected to haul in $45 million to $55 million in its opening weekend, according to analyst and pre-sale ticket estimates.

The film will have to have to do lots of business in the coming weeks to break even. It cost an estimated $250 million to make, before marketing expenses. The movie grossed $44 million overseas for a total global debut of $87 million.

The “Snow White” opening number is less than that of Tim Burton’s re-imagining of “Dumbo” in 2019, which went on to gross $353 million worldwide and was considered a disappointment. “Snow White” received a grade of “B+” from audience polling firm CinemaScore, indicating a tepid response from moviegoers.

It has been a slow first quarter at the box office. So far, there has been a downturn compared with results from last year, analysts have said. It’s likely that the full first-quarter box office numbers will finish lower compared with the same time period a year ago, which were already significantly weaker than the pre-pandemic norm.

Though the beginning of 2024 started off slowly, the latter part of the first quarter saw blockbuster hits like “Dune: Part Two” and “Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire,” each of which brought in at least $80 million in their opening weekends.

“To say that the stakes for ‘Snow White’ are only on Disney ignores the fact that this entire industry was expecting a better first quarter,” said Daniel Loria, senior vice president at the Boxoffice Co., which tracks theatrical data. “We really need to finish this month on the strongest note possible.”

“Snow White” faced a tough road to its opening weekend.

The film was hit with racist backlash after Zegler, who is of Colombian and Polish descent, was announced as the lead character. Then, die-hard fans criticized her for saying the new film would update tropes from the original 1937 animated movie, including the emphasis on Snow White’s romance with Prince Charming.

The film has also faced questions about its depiction of little people and its leading actors’ viewpoints on the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza; Zegler has been an outspoken advocate for Palestinians, while Gadot has voiced support for Israel, where she was born.

It’s unclear how much the external controversy around the film factored into its opening weekend results.

But Disney’s strategy of mining its animated film library for live-action remakes shows no signs of stopping. The Burbank media and entertainment company plans to release a live-action version of “Lilo & Stitch” in May.

The remakes are a risk-management plan of sorts — the films retell familiar stories while also giving Disney a chance, in some cases, to revise problematic aspects from the original animated movies, such as giving some of the princesses more agency and diversifying the casts.

Updating the original animated films also allows Disney to redirect attention to these characters. The company can then sell new merchandise from the live-action films and pump up interest and familiarity with the characters.

That translates to other parts of Disney’s vast empire, such as theme parks, streaming services and Broadway plays, said Peter Kunze, a professor of communication at Tulane University and author of “Staging a Comeback: Broadway, Hollywood, and the Disney Renaissance.”

“By doing these live-action remakes, it’s kind of like a defibrillator to the franchise,” he said. ”It’s not only the theatrical distribution revenue stream that is dependent on this film; it’s often feeding into these other aspects of the company.”

Though fans have sometimes complained about the frequency of live-action remakes compared with original stories, these films can be big money-makers. The 2017 “Beauty and the Beast” grossed more than $1 billion worldwide, as did 2010’s “Alice in Wonderland,” 2019’s “The Lion King,” and 2019’s “Aladdin.”

And even if opening weekend is slow, these films can have a longer tail with audiences. “Snow White,” for instance, is coming at a time when many children will be on spring break, which means harried parents may be looking for things for their kids to do.

There’s little competition in the family movie space right now, with Warner Bros. Pictures “A Minecraft Movie” still two weeks away. StudioCanal’s “Paddington in Peru” (distributed by Sony in the U.S.), and Universal Pictures’ “Dog Man” came out weeks ago.

Last year’s “Mufasa: The Lion King” opened in December to a so-so $35 million domestically, but ended up grossing more than $717 million at the global box office. Family films can take a while to build buzz, and often don’t have the same types of fans who will clamor to see it in theaters as soon as possible, Loria said.

“This weekend will only tell us part of the story of ‘Snow White,’ ” he said. “The true measure of a performance of a movie like this happens in week three, week four, week five.”

I love a whodunit – especially one with a light comic touch. Rian Johnson’s Knives Out and Glass Onion are two of my most rewatched recent films, and they owe a great deal to everything from Agatha Christie to Sherlock Holmes to Columbo to the criminally underseen film The Last of Sheila.

So now, imagine my delight at Netflix’s The Residence, a high-energy comic whodunit set at the White House.

The story is this: One night, during a state dinner honoring Australia, A.B. Wynter, the head usher of the White House — played by Giancarlo Esposito — is found dead. The chief of the D.C. police brings in the brilliant detective he trusts most: Cordelia Cupp, played with verve and poise by the wonderful Uzo Aduba. Looking every bit the tweedy detective, only far more stylish, Cupp sweeps in, won’t let anyone leave, and starts to question witnesses. FBI agent Edwin Park (Randall Park), assigned to help, can only try to keep up with her.

So who did it? Wynter had many conflicts with many people, we will learn. Was it the president’s top advisor, played by Ken Marino? Was it the loyal staffer, played by Susan Kelechi Watson, who was set to succeed Wynter as head usher? Maybe it was the president’s loathed brother, played by Jason Lee, or the temperamental pastry chef played by Bronson Pinchot. What about the boozy butler, the president’s mother-in-law, the social secretary, or the engineer?

The show will tell you. The answer will be fair; the murderer is not a random person who appears at the last minute. The evidence makes sense, and much of it has been there all along. It is, in other words, a properly executed whodunit, with all the pleasures that suggests. You will get red herrings and misdirections, but Cordelia is a reliable narrator and only says what she knows to be true. She’s an avid birder (just like President Teddy Roosevelt, she points out), so you know she is detail-oriented and patient. She’s also wickedly funny, but her delivery is usually dry as a bone.

At the same time, we also get scenes from the congressional hearings about the investigation that happen later, which take testimony in preparation for the release of a report. That might be one more framing device than the show needs, but Al Franken and Eliza Coupe are funny as they play senators bickering disagreeably.

There are eight episodes; the last is almost 90 minutes long, and it’s the segment in every great story of this kind where the detective gathers all the suspects, explains the crime, and announces the killer. The show probably doesn’t need 90 minutes of that; it could have used a trim in this section. That’s the closest thing to a beef that I have. But they’re being true to the roots of the genre by allowing Aduba to make a meal of it.

There’s a lot of respect for tradition here; the episodes have titles that pay tribute to other murder mysteries — there are episodes called “Knives Out” and “Dial M for Murder.” (And one called “The Fall of the House of Usher,” which is a good enough pun that it’s easy to forgive even if the original is not quite a murder mystery.) A good execution of a beloved formula is a wonderful thing, and you won’t regret letting this one suck you in.

This piece also appeared in NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour newsletter. Sign up for the newsletter so you don’t miss the next one, plus get weekly recommendations about what’s making us happy.

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Officially, playwright and screenwriter Marco Ramirez began working on the Broadway musical “Buena Vista Social Club” a little more than six years ago. But if you start the clock when the Cuban supergroup’s music first seeped into his soul, he’s been penning it for decades. Like many Cubans and Cuban Americans, the silky crooning of band member Ibrahim Ferrer and the insatiable rhythm of “Candela” wafted through his grandparents’ living room and into his teenage ears. For him, the album represented a bond not just to Cuba, but to each other: “My grandfather is as much of a music nerd as I was,” says Ramirez. “We connected the same way two teenagers would, opening the liner notes and saying, ‘Look at these lyrics, look at this stuff.’ ”

The electrifying new musical began an open-ended run at Broadway’s Schoenfeld Theatre on March 19 and traces the origins of the Cuban music supergroup that rose to international fame after the success of their eponymous Grammy-winning 1997 album and the 1999 Wim Wenders documentary of the same name. The show’s creative team boasts a pedigree on par with the band itself, including Tony-nominated director Saheem Ali, two-time Tony-winner Justin Peck ( (“Illinoise,” “Carousel”) and his co-choreographer Patricia Delgado and Tony-winning producer Orin Wolf (“The Band’s Visit,” “Once”).

Unfolding across two timelines, the show follows the golden age Cuban musicians as they navigate Havana’s segregated social scene at the onset of the Cuban Revolution, and 40 years later during their twilight years as they hurtle toward the Carnegie Hall concert depicted in the documentary. While all of the songs are performed in their original Spanish, the dialogue is completely in English.

“Right now, you and I are a thousand miles away, speaking very different tongues, on a very different island,” explains character Juan de Marcos, inspired by his real-life counterpart. “But a sound like this? It tends to travel.”

Like the “Buena Vista” musicians, Ramirez also followed his dream thousands of miles from home, his artistic pursuits carrying the first-generation son of Cuban immigrants from his Hialeah hometown to New York, where he studied playwriting at NYU and Juilliard. Before he could even accept his master’s degree from the latter, he was off again, this time to Los Angeles, where he joined the staffs of award-winning television series, including “Sons of Anarchy” and “Orange Is the New Black.” More recently, he served as showrunner on “Daredevil” and “La Máquina,” and judging by the multiple projects he’s contractually-forbidden from discussing, he’s cemented his status as one of Hollywood’s most in-demand scribes.

Right now, though, Ramirez and I are thousands of miles away from L.A. in a very different metropolis: New York City,, where we break bread at Margon, a counter serve Cuban restaurant two blocks from the show’s theater on 45th Street. Our conversation lasted just 15 minutes before Ramirez was called back to the theater for a last-minute creative discussion about his Broadway debut. So, like the “Buena Vista” band members, we too took our show on the road, through Times Square, finally concluding at a nearby bar. After all, a conversation like this, occurring just days before opening night? It tends to travel.

You grew up with this music. What does this music mean to you now?

I think it’s entirely about honoring what came before us and also — we live in a world that is fascinated with what’s new and what’s young. Music is the only place where they really respect when an instrument ages. When a laptop ages, it gets thrown away. But in the world of music, it’s like, “This violin is 100 years old. This piano is 200 years old.” Age is seen as a sign of quality because it has endured.

Marco Ramirez speaks with The Times over lunch at Margon in New York City.

(Nicholas Ducassi, Los Angeles Times)

I’m Cuban. You’re Cuban. We grew up with this music. As you started working on this show, did you feel any anxiety or nervousness about holding up the mantle of — I don’t know — our entire Cuban identity?

I felt a responsibility to the music. As a kid having been born and raised in Miami — to me, Cuba was a place where music came from. That was my first real relationship to the island and that culture.

And so I have felt like a protector to some degree of the music throughout this process. … I’ve felt a little bit like Indiana Jones running through a temple where tons of things are being thrown at you and you’re just trying to save the one beautiful thing because you’re like, “This belongs in a museum.” That’s me. And I feel that way about this music really passionately.

Can you take us through the early days? How did you feel when you first heard about [the project]?

It was an immediate yes. It was like I was on “Family Feud” and they asked the question and I was like, WHAM, on the buzzer. A commercial producer named Orin Wolf approached me, and he had done a show called “The Band’s Visit” on Broadway, which was a very successful, very beautiful and very moving musical. He said, “I love this music. I don’t speak Spanish, but I think there’s a theater project here. Can we start talking about it?” And my response was “YES” in all caps. And from that point on, we were in lockstep and walking together on this journey. We went to Cuba several times. We met with a lot of the musicians. We went to Mexico to meet with some of the musicians’ families who lived there. We’ve been kind of globetrotting and we really feel protective over this music. And we’ve been doing it together.

Marco Ramirez speaks with L.A. Times reporter Nicholas Ducassi and friend Frankie J. Alvarez outside of the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre in New York City

(Nicholas Ducassi, Los Angeles Times)

One of the lines that jumped out at me is when Young Haydee tells her sister Omara [Portuondo], basically, “We have this potential deal with Capitol Records, and we need to leave the island. There’s this whole future ahead of us if we just leap and say yes to this.” When you —

(Laughs) That’s actually better than the line.

Ha, thanks. When you were in undergrad, before you had booked a single professional job as a writer, what did you see as your future? What did you hope would unfold?

Broadway was not anywhere in the picture, but I thought, “I want to write plays. I want to get them produced or produce them myself,” which we did. And for some weird, arbitrary reason, I told myself, “And when I’m 40, I can write TV.” It was like a weird rule. Like, “[writing for television] is something 40-year-old people do.” But at the age of 18, 19, 20, all I was trying to do was get a couple productions of my plays done anywhere that would do them. … I got to write for TV before I was 30, which was nice.

What do you have left to do? I guess that means it’s all over for you.

I’m really hoping that next year I’ll get traded to the Miami Heat.

Early on in the play, when Juan de Marcos is trying to get [legendary Cuban singer] Omara [Portuondo] to record the album, he delivers this pretty stunning monologue: “This record, the one you did after it, and the one after that … they changed my life. They’re the reason I went to conservatory. They’re the reason I got two PhDs.” Who was your Omara Portuondo?

In a way, that’s me talking to the [“Buena Vista Social Club”] record, to the legacy of this record. This record for me was the high watermark of what music could do … and proof that Cuban compositions belonged right next to Beethoven. In some ways, that became kind of the rallying cry of the whole piece: We just want to fight for some space and some respect …. Like, when did the Mount Rushmore just suddenly become Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, Rachmaninoff — all the other names that we know? Who’s to say that there aren’t other people from other places, from other continents who deserve to be considered canonically among the best music ever made? … I really do genuinely feel that way about some of these compositions. They are all-timers. The melodies are all up there with the most beautiful melodies ever made.

“Buena Vista Social Club” book writer Marco Ramirez speaks with the real life Cuban bandleader Juan de Marcos at the show’s first rehearsal.

(Andy Henderson / Buena Vista Social Club on Broadway)

Toward the end of the play, as Compay [Segundo], you write: “These songs you like so much. They’re all about heartbreak, about longing … But they’re not beautiful because we wrote them that way … They’re beautiful … because we lived them.” As a Cuban American from Miami myself, as you are, there is a distance, both geographic and chronological, between the life that you lived, born and raised in Miami, and the life that they lived, born in and dying in Cuba. How did you close that distance?

I think the first step was acknowledging my privilege, but also that my lived experience was never going to be the experience of somebody who was born and raised and lived in Cuba. I identify as Cuban American, I identify as Cuban culturally, but I do not have the same lived experience as people who have lived both the joys and the sorrows of it.

Part of that is what made visiting [Cuba] so, so insightful. Just being there and interacting with a lot of people who had never left the island. But really just trying to inhabit the point of view of these artists who were born and raised and died there and what that must have felt like for them, for the outside world to keep looking at their music and saying, “Oh my God, it’s so lovely. It’s so beautiful. Everything is so filled with exotic flavor and it’s just so romantic.” But for them to not fully comprehend the level of suffering that went into the songwriting, the level of suffering that went into the performance, even just the agony of practice to be able to play like Leo [Reyna], our pianist, or Renesito [Avich], our tres player — the hours spent alone in a room with an instrument to be able to solo in a huge way and like be the Jimi Hendrix of the tres. That’s a lot of work and heartache and sacrifice. There were a lot of parties those guys didn’t go to so that today they could be the party.

Marco Ramirez poses with his grandfather Felix Delgado

(Marco Ramirez)

On that note, heartbreak and hardship is now unfortunately so part and parcel to the Cuban condition, but the show is also really funny. So many laughs come out of some of the most heartbreaking moments of the show. Was that intentional?

I don’t think it was an active choice. I just don’t think I would have been capable of doing it without comedy. I think my experience of Cuban culture has largely been an experience of Cuban comedy. Whether or not that’s the storytelling tradition of my uncle telling a joke at the table or my aunt or my mother, or my grandmother telling a joke. And especially, I think, when the songs are so heavy and so about heartbreak. Not all of them, but many of them are so heavy and about heartbreak. It’s like they’re either about heartbreak or they’re about sex. It was about the counterbalance.

What drives you to write?

Oh, God. I’m not good at anything else, Nick. I’m not even sure I’m good at this … What was the question? “What drives you to write?” I don’t know … I do fundamentally believe in the power of storytelling and stories, whether or not that’s theater or movies or books. It is a way that we make sense of the world, and I believe in that as an art form. Like one believes in Santa Claus.

What’s it like to finally get to this point where you can’t touch it anymore? It’s out of your hands and this is the script that’s going to go in black and white forever?

A lot of therapy and a lot of meditation are going to help me get through the next week. … I genuinely hope that people like it. I’m proud of it. Most importantly, it’s been a lot of fun to make.

Thank you for your time. My dad’s coming to see it with me tonight for the second time. Thank you for bringing the old spirits back for him.

Thank you for the Margon chicken thighs. They were delicious.