Wildly woke and outspoken Hollywood “star” Rachel Zegler appears to have another bomb on her hands to add to her growing list of box office failures with the weak debut of her latest film, Y2K.
The horror/comedy with a modest $15 million budget landed with a thud in theaters for its opening weekend, making an anemic $2.1 million over three days. The slow opening makes it unlikely that the film will come anywhere near making back its budget and advertising costs.
It is another bump in her road to stardom. Zegler wowed critics with her star performance as Maria in the 2021 remake of West Side Story and she was immediately tagged as Hollywood’s up-and-coming new star. But since that time, every film she has been in has laid an egg on opening weekend. Indeed, even the musical that critics loved so much didn’t earn back its $100 million budget and only earned $76 million worldwide.
Her other two big movies also had disappointing opening weekends, with Shazam! Fury of the Gods and The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes both turning up earning less than half their budgets over their openings. Both later turned a profit, but neither opened strong despite being entries in two hugely popular series.
Zegler, of course, has been extremely outspoken about her woke ideals, giving her “star power” no room to grow before revealing her intolerant side to the public.
The star of Disney’s hugely expensive remake of Snow White has been variously heard attacking “white privilege,” telling white people to “learn Spanish,” she was heard blasting the famed 1937 version of Disney’s Snow White as sexist and suggested that the prince character should be eliminated from the story, declared her support for the Palestinians during a film promotion tour. She has also accused Trump’s voters of being mentally ill and hateful, then said she wished that harm would come to them, and topped that all off by moaning that anyone who opposes her wild-eyed proclamations is a racist.
Her loud-mouthed antics have cast a serious pall over Disney’s upcoming remake of Snow White. The negative reactions to the film’s star and her constant stream of woke proclamations can be seen in the backlash that has hit the film’s trailer on YouTube. By December, the trailer had earned only 17,000 “up” votes while being slammed with an astounding 215,000 “down” votes.
As to her latest film, Y2K, it opened far back in the pack as the eighth most popular film at the box office.
Y2K did so poorly that a re-issue of a film from 2017 and a Bollywood production beat Zegler’s film at the box office last weekend.
The top three movies were Moana 2, Wicked, and Gladiator 2. But in fourth place was the Indian Telugu-language action drama Pushpa: The Rule Part 2. And in sixth place — still two films higher in earnings than Zegler’s — was a re-release of the 2017 sci fi film, Interstellar.
Even the seventh placed film earned twice what Zegler’s Y2K made with the little-known anime film Solo Leveling: ReAwakening earning 4.1 million.
For such an up-and-coming star, Rachel Zegler seems entirely unable to get viewers into cinema seats, not just this weekend, but for any movie she has been in. This all bodes very badly for Disney, which has already sunk a reported $400 million into the upcoming Snow White.
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