Snow White Flops.
Who could have seen that coming?
Disney’s latest live-action remake, this time of 1937’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarves landed this weekend after much controversy and delay. To precisely no one’s surprise it looks destined to flop. So much has been written about all the ways Disney mismanaged that film, one can only look at the victory rolls being taken by conservative outlets to get a sense of what went wrong.
I’m not going to rehash all of that1. But I will say that Snow White (the dwarves got dropped from the title of the new film cuz…ableism or something?) is now going to be a classic example of “get woke go broke”, whether one likes that concept or not. When race-swapping the lead character (Snow White is a German story, the lead actress was Latina), is one of the least controversial aspects of a film in a culture-war sense…that’s something! What can studio executives learn from this?
Fundamentally, studio executives need to start growing some balls and stop worrying about what the whiniest person online thinks (yes, this is true for conservatives as well as progressives). I like Peter Dinklage as an actor, but Disney was outright dumb to take his off-the-cuff podcast comments as canon when it came to the dwarves (if you somehow missed it Dinklage implied that having dwarves in the movie was…offensive somehow. How? Who knows, but Disney executives bought it apparently). It should have been obvious that Dinklage’s advice would cost actual dwarf actors their jobs and that might not go over well. Disney apparently flirted with having some kind of “magical creatures”…who in one photoshoot2 just look like a bunch of hipsters…still including one dwarf, before dropping that idea to go with CGI dwarves. Enter the uncanny valley. At some point, Disney should have realized it was getting too neurotic trying to please unpleasable activists and gone back to the source material.
Indeed, that’s one thing Disney should maybe consider a bit: sticking to the source material more closely. Granted, the original fairy tales are all already “Disneyfied” to remove their more violent and sexual elements. But making a movie in order to try to win the Bluesky Awards seems like a bad idea.
Second, maybe people whose job it is to make us laugh, cry, bring us news, entertain us, etc., should reconsider how wise it is to open their yap. Certainly, don’t criticize the original source material. “We’re going to remake Old Yeller but with a cat, cuz dogs suck” isn’t going to go over well. And maybe, in essence, telling half your prospective audience to go fuck off and die is a bad plan. Yes, lead actress Rachel Zegler more-or-less did both these things3. She proved to be an incredibly bad spokeswoman for this movie. I don’t want to tell people in the public eye that they should never speak openly about things they’re passionate about. But honestly, the rest of us are sick of it. The speeches at awards ceremonies, the Instagram posts, the dumb comments about politics in interviews. Honestly, we don’t believe you’re that moral anyway
Third, I think it’s great to tell stories from different parts of the world. So…do that. I’m fine with a German girl playing Snow White. Putting a Latina actress in the lead role of a European fairy tale doesn’t make me think, “Oh, hey, Disney gets it!” To be fair, Disney has dabbled with Mulan, Moana, Coco, etc. Tell us more of those stories we haven’t heard yet! That hits the diversity bell without the inevitable backlash that comes with race-swapping.
Lastly…I think the “girlboss” trope has become as cliché as the “damsel in distress” narrative had before it. I think the problem with the “damsel in distress” narrative was never that girls and women didn’t sometimes like it, but rather that it often seemed that nothing else was on offer. Now, we appear to have reversed that situation. It would almost be braver these days if Disney did an unapologetically “damsel in distress” movie. Or maybe something more complicated…it might be nice to see a Disney princess who wasn’t a cookie-cutter for whatever the current age considered to be a paragon of feminine virtue.
Maybe Snow White will mark the end of an age when diversity mean pushing a black or Latina girl to the front of every European-origin fairy tale and calling it a day. No, my mistake, first call anyone who thought that was bad storytelling a racist, then call it a day. It’s all so boring and predictable. There are so many other great stories from around the world waiting to be told. Give us some of that. We don’t need Asian American Bambi.
And, to be clear, this is not a review of the film, which I have not seen nor particularly plan to. It may very well be a lovely film, though reviews and audience reactions have been mixed at best. I will limit my comments to what is publicly known about the film and controversies surrounding it.
Exactly what the purpose of this photoshoot was has never been made clear, as it doesn’t feature any of the film’s main actors or actresses. I assume it was some kind of proof-of-concept.
Her specific comment following the November 2024 election of Donald Trump was “…May Trump supporters and Trump voters and Trump himself never know peace.” Sure, I added the profanity, but the underlying message is the same. And no, one does not need to be a Trump voter to find this sentiment obnoxious. She did apologize, to be fair.