Snow White and the seven circles of Hell

Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who is the most annoying of them all? The answer, it seems, is Rachel Zegler, the new Snow White, who has managed to turn herself into an international hate figure because she can’t keep her progressive political views to herself.

The upshot is that Disney’s $350 million remake of one of its most famous films is flopping at the box office. It generated $45 million in ticket sales in its opening weekend. That sounds a lot, yet it’s a lot less than other recent Disney adaptations brought in, even including other woke disasters such as 2023’s Peter Pan & Wendy.

Reviews of the new Snow White have been overwhelmingly negative, too. “Toe-curlingly terrible,” said the Guardian, “Boring” said the New York Post, while the Daily Mail’s Brian Viner called it a “painfully muddle-headed affair.” Public reactions on social media have been even harsher.

The New York Times, for its part, has called the film “one of the most troubled projects in Disney’s 102-year history.” And it does seem as if a wicked witch cursed the production from the off, as filming was disrupted by the Covid pandemic. And everybody could see trouble ahead when the makers ditched the “seven dwarves” and replaced them with “magical creatures,” which managed to offend the very dwarf actors whose feelings the studio was trying to protect.

But the most hellish problem, it seems, has been the lead. In 2022, in the midst of the Black Lives Matter moment, Disney decided to pick Zegler as the first Latina Snow White. Fired up by the temper of the times, Zegler then declared that her character was “not going to be saved by the prince,” because that would be sexist. She called the original 1937 film “dated” and “weird.”

In August last year, she courted more controversy by tweeting “and always remember, free Palestine,” which went down terribly with her studio’s considerable Jewish contingent and caused a public fall-out between Zegler and her Israeli co-star Gal Gadot, who plays the Evil Queen.

Then, when Donald Trump was re-elected in November, Zegler took to Instagram to pronounce herself “speechless” and “heartbroken.” Such sentiments were fairly commonplace among luvvie types at the time – and could easily have gone unnoticed. Zegler went further, though. “Fuck Donald Trump,” she said, adding: “May Trump supporters and Trump voters and Trump himself never know peace.” Disney, now panicking about the anger its star was generating online, made her apologize for that. But it didn’t stop the corporation plowing ahead with its “woke-a-thon” adaptation. In recent days, even more behind-the-scenes acrimony is coming to light, with Marc Platt, the film’s producer, calling Zegler “immature.”

Critics are left asking if Disney will ever learn that the viewing public don’t want live-action cartoon characters to lecture them on politics. People also don’t like classics being recycled to reflect the weird and already outdated politics of the BLM movement. These lessons won’t be learned any time soon, it seems: the corporation is releasing an “experimental adaptation” of Hercules this summer.

The above is taken from Freddy Gray’s weekly Americano newsletter. To subscribe click here.