Once upon a time, Disney made a business decision: if it was going to adapt its library of animated movies into live-action features (with merch and theme park tie-ins galore), it should add Snow White to the pipeline. The 1937 classic – the company’s first full-length animated feature ever, its first crack at a veritable goldmine of princess IP – would follow the modernizations (and attendant revisions) of Cinderella and Beauty and the Beast, released in 2015 and 2017, respectively. It was only logical, Snow White being one of its most recognizable and brand-defining characters. The company began developing a live-action feature in 2016, in the heady first wave of its IP era.
Nine years later, Snow White has finally made it the big screen, but the journey has been anything but a fairytale. The remake has been a saga of delays, culture war flashpoints and controversies, some earned and much not. The new Snow White has managed the difficult feat of being a children’s movie that irritates both ends of the political spectrum at once, from rightwing nuts crying “woke” over the casting of Rachel Zegler, an American actor of Colombian descent, to pro-Palestinian advocates upset over the presence of the Israeli actor and IDF supporter Gal Gadot as the Evil Queen. And that’s not even getting to the obvious and nagging issue of the titular seven dwarves.
The title proved toxic enough that Disney took the rare step of scaling back its premiere six days ahead of its release, limiting the media presence to talent-friendly in-house press. (Though not without precedent – Warner Bros acted similarly with the 2023 rollout for The Flash, premiering in the midst of star Ezra Miller’s many scandals.) People have picked up on the fact that, well, the vibes are not good, with multiple reports that Disney is going through the motions to get it over and done with, stumbling to the finish line.
How did this bankable story become Disney’s poisoned apple? Snow White has seemed cursed from the start, in part by Disney business logic and in part by the misfortune of landing in an environment hankering for disproportionate outrage. The issues began with the announcement of Zegler as the German fairytale princess who canonically (starting with the Brothers Grimm in 1812) possessed “skin as white as snow”. The new version revises the etymology, opening the tale with an explanation that she was named for surviving a snowstorm when she was an infant. (A similar story was used to explain the name of Ginnifer Goodwin’s version of the character on the ABC fantasy series Once Upon a Time.) Rightwing commentators cried “woke”, with plenty of straight-up racism and outright harassment, similar to the kind heaped on Halle Bailey, a Black actor and singer, after she was cast in the Little Mermaid in 2019, including physical harassment. “There was a lot of harassment from a certain group of people – they were showing up at my apartment and screaming profanities,” Zegler, 23, told Cosmopolitan last year.
There was also pushback to Zegler’s comments about the original film, largely taken out of context to show that she disrespected it. In line with the feminist-ish framings of Cinderella and Beauty and the Beast, Zegler marketed Snow White as a modern update of the 1937 film by pointing out that film’s shortcomings. She called the original “extremely dated when it comes to the ideas of women being in roles of power and what a woman is fit for” and described it as “came out in 1937, and very evidently so” with “a big focus on her love story with a guy who literally stalks her”.
Selling Snow White’s agency only fanned the flames. “She’s not going to be saved by the prince and she’s not going to be dreaming about true love,” she said at Disney’s D23 meet-and-greet in 2022. “She’s dreaming about becoming the leader she knows she can be and the leader that her late father told her that she could be if she was fearless, fair, brave and true.” In truth, there is a love interest for Snow White played by Broadway’s Andrew Burnap, who certainly looks the part of Disney prince. But the specter of a downgraded Prince Charming triggered outrage on both sides of the Atlantic, from Twitter accounts with names like “End Wokeness”, Britain’s Daily Mail and the US rightwing channel Daily Wire, which made its own anti-woke rival movie in response.
Meanwhile, Disney caught flak for its handling of the seven dwarves. The actor Peter Dinklage, who has a form of dwarfism called achondroplasia, blasted the remake as “fucking backwards”. Though he praised Zegler’s casting, he said, “you’re progressive in one way but you’re still making that fucking backward story of seven dwarves living in the cave. What the fuck are you doing, man?” (Disney released a statement saying it had been “consulting with members of the dwarfism community” to “avoid reinforcing stereotypes”.) Others criticized Disney for using CGI to create the seven “magical creatures,” thus depriving dwarf performers of potential jobs. (Another Snow White spinoff, Snow White and the Huntsman, was criticized upon release in 2014 for casting actors of average height, including Ian McShane and Bob Hoskins, as the dwarves.)
Creative issues kept the film in limbo as its budget ballooned to over $270m. Then the dual writers and actors strikes delayed its release a full year later. Meanwhile, Zegler found herself mired in even more controversy for publicly mourning Donald Trump’s 2024 electoral victory on Instagram, writing that she hoped he and his supporters “never know peace”. (The West Side Story actor later apologized – “Hatred and anger have caused us to move further and further away from peace and understanding, and I am sorry I contributed to the negative discourse,” she wrote in an Instagram story.) Rumors abounded of bad blood between Zegler, who has supported Palestine during Israel’s invasion of Gaza, and Gadot, a vocal proponent of the Israeli military, and the film found itself at the intersection of another hot-blooded conflict; just this week, protesters from both sides disrupted Gadot’s Walk of Fame ceremony in Hollywood.
All of this has Disney appearing skittish. Advance ticket sales did not open until two weeks before the domestic premiere, an unusually small window. For comparison, Disney opened ticket sales for this past holidays’ Mufasa: The Lion King and 2023 summer tentpole The Little Mermaid, the most recent Disney live-action features, a month in advance of their premieres. Then there was the pared-down US premiere, which the studio’s said offered “a more celebratory, family-friendly afternoon event to match the tone and target audience for the film”. While Gadot made the rounds in New York, appearing on Good Morning America, Live With Kelly & Mark and The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, Zegler led the relatively quiet roll-out in Europe; instead of a splashy UK premiere, she performed an original song at a castle in Spain.
But the show goes on – both actors appeared all smiles at the US premiere, posing for photos together with the director Marc Webb. In a premiere-week interview with Allure, Zegler provided very media-trained appeals to kindness and tolerance. “Snow White chooses kindness and still makes change,” she said. “Power takes many forms. I hope we’ll see a new dawn of kindness and acceptance in the next couple of years.”
Bad press aside, the story of Snow White is not yet written in stone. The film was met with lukewarm to positive reviews, with the Hollywood Reporter praising it as a “mostly captivating” update to the tale and the New York Times calling it “perfectly adequate”, and OK-enough box office projections. Most estimates have Snow White grossing about $40-50m in the US and over $100m globally – nowhere near the $357m made during Beauty and the Beast’s opening weekend nor its $270m budget, but not a full flop. Its fortunes may still be improved by a relative lack of competition during a slow month for the box office, but that would also depend on its core base of viewers – mothers and daughters – showing up despite, not because of, controversy it has thus far failed to escape. The ultimate legacy of Snow White remains unwritten, but it enters its premiere weekend a troubled tale.
