Disney Mortgaged His House for Snow White

On December 21, 1937, Walt Disney sat in the Carthay Circle Theatre in Los Angeles next to Judy Garland, Marlene Dietrich, and Charles Laughton, watching the first feature-length cel animation ever screened in English. When the credits rolled, the audience stood and applauded. For most of the previous three years, almost no one in Hollywood had thought it would get there.

The industry's nickname for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs during production was "Disney's Folly." Studios had been making short cartoons for two decades; nobody believed an audience would sit through eighty minutes of one. Disney's brother Roy, who ran the studio's finances, tried to talk him out of it. So did his wife Lillian. Walt's original budget was $250,000 — already ten times what a Silly Symphony short cost. By the end, the film had run up $1,488,422.74 in production expenses, roughly six times the estimate.

The money didn't exist. Walt mortgaged his house to keep animators paid. Midway through, he took a $250,000 loan from Bank of America's A. P. Giannini, who came to the studio, watched the rough footage, and signed off. The studio survived month to month on the strength of unfinished frames.

It opened to $7.8 million in international box office on the first run — at 25-cent ticket prices in the middle of the Depression. By December 1939 it was briefly the highest-grossing sound film ever made, until Gone with the Wind passed it. Counting every re-release through the present, Snow White has grossed about $418 million; adjusted for inflation, that's around $2.3 billion in North America alone.

The profit went straight into a new studio campus in Burbank, which opened in 1940. The folly bought the lot.