How Much Did Gal Gadot Get Paid for Snow White?

The $15 Million Rumor

The number attached to Gal Gadot’s Snow White paycheck is $15 million. FandomWire, reporting on a Spoiler US cast-salary breakdown, states that Gadot made a “massive (rumored) paycheck of about $15 million” for playing the Evil Queen — while Rachel Zegler, who plays Snow White herself, was paid “just $2 million.” Saiph24/7’s earnings rundown repeats the $15 million figure and calls it the highest pay among the cast. That is the entire published record: one salary table, echoed by aggregators, with a $13 million gap between the two leads as its headline.

As with every number in this batch, the provenance matters. No trade publication — not Variety, not The Hollywood Reporter, not Deadline — has published a verified figure for Gadot’s Snow White salary, and Disney does not comment on cast pay. The $15 million is a rumor with a single origin, and the $2 million for Zegler comes from the same table. What gave the rumor its legs was not its sourcing but its shape: a supporting player reportedly earning seven and a half times what the title lead earned is exactly the kind of inversion that reads as scandal, whether or not it is true.

The $13 Million Gap Debate

The gap is the story, and it is worth asking why it felt so plausible. Part of the answer is Hollywood’s documented history of paying established names more than the young leads they support — the exact dynamic that made Gadot’s own $300,000 Wonder Woman salary a viral pay-gap talking point in 2017. Audiences have been trained by real scandals to believe the worst, and a rumor that fits the pattern gets shared before it gets checked.

But there is a less cynical explanation for the shape of the numbers, if they are even roughly right. Gadot in 2024 was a proven global box-office name with a $20 million quote on the open market; Zegler was a 22-year-old with one leading role (West Side Story) and a supporting turn in the Hunger Games prequel. Studios pay for the quote you bring into the room, not the size of the role you walk out with. A $15 million veteran and a $2 million newcomer is, in cold deal-making terms, an unremarkable pairing — the scandal is in the optics, not the economics. The honest framing: the numbers are unverified, but the structure they describe is how Hollywood actually works.

The $270 Million Flop Around It

Whatever the cast was paid, the film around them was one of the most expensive failures in Disney’s live-action history. Forbes’ reporting, via FandomWire, put the production budget at $269.4 million — a figure swollen by extensive reshoots and years of delays. ComingSoon reported the film opened to roughly $87 million worldwide, a catastrophic start for a $270 million production, and it never recovered.

The production was troubled long before release. Both leads generated their own controversies — Zegler for her outspoken criticism of the 1937 original and her political posts, Gadot for her own political visibility — and Disney reportedly separated the two during press events and assigned Zegler a social media consultant. The film’s CGI dwarfs drew their own backlash. Against that background, the salary rumor functioned as one more piece of evidence in the prosecution: a $270 million movie that could not even pay its title character fairly, or so the story went. The rumor did not need to be verified to be useful — it just needed to be plausible, and on this production, everything damaging was plausible.

From $300,000 to $15 Million: Gadot’s Pay Arc

The irony of the pay-gap framing is that Gadot herself was once the poster child for the other side of it. As Variety reported back in 2014, she signed a three-picture Warner Bros. deal — Batman v Superman, Wonder Woman, Justice League — at $300,000 per picture. When the $300,000 Wonder Woman figure went viral in 2017, contrasted against Henry Cavill’s reported $14 million for Man of Steel, it became one of the defining pay-gap stories of the decade — though Vanity Fair noted at the time that Cavill’s figure included backend and that Gadot’s matched what Chris Evans got for the first Captain America.

What followed was one of the steepest pay climbs in modern Hollywood. Gadot reportedly earned around $10 million for Wonder Woman 1984, then $20 million for Netflix’s Red Notice — matching co-stars Dwayne Johnson and Ryan Reynolds dollar for dollar. A reported $15 million for Snow White, if accurate, would actually represent a step down from her Red Notice quote — the kind of haircut stars take for prestige studio fare, or in this case, for a Disney live-action showcase that was supposed to be an event. The arc from $300,000 to $20 million in under a decade is the real story of Gadot’s compensation; the Snow White rumor is just its latest, messiest chapter.

Zegler’s $2 Million and the Inverse Math

The other half of the rumor deserves its own scrutiny. Rachel Zegler’s reported $2 million for playing the title role in a $270 million Disney tentpole looks startling until you remember how Hollywood prices youth. Zegler’s résumé at signing: a Golden Globe-winning breakout in West Side Story (2021), a supporting role in Shazam! Fury of the Gods, and the Hunger Games prequel The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes. That is a promising young actress’s résumé, not a $15 million quote — and Disney, which has a century of practice paying newcomers newcomer money on live-action remakes, would have had no reason to offer more.

There is a precedent on this very site: our Snow White coverage of Zegler’s own salary walks through the same $2 million figure from the same table. The consistency is worth noting — both numbers come from one place — and so is the asymmetry it reveals. In studio deal-making, the title of the film and the title of the role are different currencies. Gadot was paid for being Gal Gadot; Zegler was paid for being a talented 22-year-old. The $13 million gap, real or rumored, is the market price of a decade of stardom.

The Evil Queen Role Itself

Lost in the salary discourse is the role itself — and it was a curious one. Gadot’s Evil Queen is the film’s antagonist but not its center; the remake restructured the 1937 story around Zegler’s Snow White, leaving the Queen as a supporting presence with the film’s showiest musical number. Critics were divided on the performance, with some reviews singling out Gadot’s camp villainy as a highlight and others finding it the film’s weakest element — the kind of split that tends to follow Gadot, whose acting has always polarized more than her stardom would suggest.

The casting was also the film’s most politically charged choice before a frame was shot. An Israeli actress playing the villain in a Disney fairy tale became its own discourse, layered over Zegler’s equally scrutinized politics, until the film’s press tour felt like a diplomatic exercise. A reported $15 million is, among other things, the price of walking into that storm as the biggest name on the call sheet. Whether the fee was worth it — for Gadot, or for Disney — is a question the $87 million opening weekend answered brutally.

The Bottom Line

How much did Gal Gadot get paid for Snow White? The rumored figure is $15 million as the Evil Queen — reported by FandomWire via Spoiler US, repeated by aggregators, and never confirmed by Disney or Gadot. The same table puts Rachel Zegler at $2 million for the title role, creating the $13 million gap that became the story.

What is verified: the $269.4 million budget (Forbes), the ~$87 million worldwide opening, Gadot’s documented climb from $300,000 per picture on her 2014 WB deal to $10 million for Wonder Woman 1984 to $20 million for Red Notice, and the film’s status as one of Disney’s costliest live-action failures. The honest read is that the $15 million is an unverified rumor with a plausible shape — a veteran’s quote next to a newcomer’s, on a production where every number eventually became an indictment.

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