As sure as the Evil Queen tricked Snow White into eating a poisoned apple, the live-action adaptation of Walt Disney’s 1937 animated classic has forced the studio to swallow a healthy serving of controversy that is proving just as toxic.
When the dust settles on what could be a modest box office return at best and a critical response that may be charitably described as middling, Snow White will be remembered as one of the most troubled productions in a century of Disney films.
From cast dramas and pandemic delays, to the actors and writers strikes and a major on-set fire, you don’t need a Magic Mirror to see this film has been plagued with problems.
And, when the production and marketing bills are added up, Hollywood insiders estimate Snow White’s cost to the studio could be north of $500 million.
Industry projections have the film tracking for a US opening weekend take of $72m, which would be considerably less than other recent Disney live-action remakes, such as 2017’s Beauty and the Beast ($277m), 2019’s Lion King ($304m) and Aladdin ($145m), and even the similarly troubled 2023 reboot of The Little Mermaid ($151m).
It’s worth noting the kids who watched those four animated hits when they were originally released in the late 1980s and ’90s are still alive and buying cinema tickets, unlike those who watched Disney’s first animated success story nearly 90 years ago.
For anyone wondering how well the original has aged, just asked the titular star of the live-action remake, Rachel Zegler, who outraged Disney lifers with this hot take in 2022.
“The original cartoon came out in 1937, and very evidently so. There’s a big focus on (Snow White’s) love story with a guy who literally stalks her. Weird! Weird. So we didn’t do that this time,” the West Side Story actor said in an interview at Disney’s D23 Expo.
Zegler was already in the crosshairs of the anti-woke brigade just for being a Latina cast as Disney’s “fairest” princess, just as Halle Bailey was when she landed the role of Ariel in The Little Mermaid.
Such casting decisions made sense to Disney a decade ago when these films went into development, because the studio was leaning heavily into diversity in screen representation at the time, believing, with some justification, it was the future.
How times change. Now Snow White has landed in cinemas against a backdrop of the Trump administration demonising diversity, equality and inclusion measures, and major companies including Disney are actively watering down corporate policies in this space.
A headline on the Fox News website in America this week read: “Mirror, mirror on the wall, will woke Snow White cause Disney’s fall?”
To make things even more awkward, Zegler then made pro-Palestine comments when the film’s trailer was released last year, which sparked rumours of a spat with Israeli co-star Gal Gadot, who plays the Evil Queen.
Zegler also reacted to the US Presidential election result last year by taking to social media to write, “may Trump supporters and Trump voters and Trump himself never know peace”. She later apologised.
Publicity own-goals aside, Zegler is the undisputed best thing about the new remake.
The worst? Well, there are seven of them and Disney knew they’d be an issue from the get-go.
“You’re progressive in one way but then you’re still making that f...ing backward story about seven dwarfs living in a cave together,” Game of Thrones star Peter Dinklage said of the project in 2022.
Dinklage isn’t in the movie, not least because Disney opted to replace the iconic seven dwarfs with seven “magical creatures”, who look exactly as you’d expect caricatures of dwarfs to look.
So, in trying not to offend people of short stature, the studio arguably caused even more harm to them by taking away hard-to-get roles and offering uncanny-valley mimicry instead.
Dopey? You bet.
Even the new songs by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul of The Greatest Showman and La La Land fame are underwhelming, but maybe we’re taking this all too seriously.
After all, this 1812 fairy tale from the Brothers Grimm has had some rough outings over the years, from a 2007 modernisation, Sydney White, starring Amanda Bynes, to The New Adventures of Snow White, a 1969 sex comedy out of then-West Germany.
The latest adaptation was likely fuelled by frustration that Disney’s classic film had been leveraged by rival studios (see: 2012’s Mirror, Mirror and Snow White and the Huntsman).
Disney opted for a more conventional remake, but only after shelving plans for a kung-fu iteration with seven Shaolin monks, and abandoning a spin-off project, Rose Red, with Brie Larson attached.
Would either of those have been better than what we actually got? Probably not, although the kung-fu version sounds fun, which is something you can’t say about Snow White.