The curse of Disney’s Snow White

One of the early decisions David Zaslav made after becoming the CEO of Warner Bros Discovery in 2022 was to cancel the release of Batgirl, a summer blockbuster the studio had spent $90 million making. According to industry insiders, Zaslav thought the politically correct reimagining of the comic book character, whose best friend in the film is played by a trans actor, would be box office poison. Better to take the tax write-off, he decided, than spend tens of millions of dollars trying to market the film to anican public that was fed up with being lectured by virtue-signaling Hollywood liberals. Incidentally, the highest-grossing film of 2022 in the US was Top Gun: Maverick.

Robert Iger, the CEO of the Walt Disney Company, must be regretting he didn’t take a leaf out of Zaslav’s book and pull the plug on Snow White, the studio’s $270 million live-action remake of its 1937 animated feature. The film has been so beset by controversies – all of them linked to identity politics – that Disney has cancelled the UK premiere. There was a stripped-down one in Los Angeles last Saturday, with a small group of hand-picked photographers and journalists, but the only interviews the cast did were with Disney employees. Four days earlier, the lead actress, Rachel Zegler, attended a party in Spain where she sang a song from the film in front of Alcázar de Segovia Castle, supposedly the inspiration for the castle in the original. She did not talk to any journalists.

The fact that Zegler has been cast as the fairy-tale princess was the first scandal to engulf the film. The 23-year-old is part Colombian, making her an odd choice to play a character described as having “skin as white as snow.” Admittedly, such color-blind casting isn’t unusual in remakes of cartoon classics – the African-American actress Halle Bailey was cast as Ariel in Disney’s live-action version of The Little Mermaid – but Zegler didn’t help her cause by denouncing the much-loved original. In a series of car-crash interviews, she explained that the story had been rewritten to make it more progressive.

“There’s a big focus on her love story with a guy who literally stalks her,” she said of the 1937 film, describing it as “weird” to a journalist in 2022. The new version is “really not about the love story at all,” she said. Instead, it’s about her character’s “inner journey” to “find her true self.” In another interview, she dismissed the original as “extremely dated” in its attitude towards women and said that in the remake the phrase “the fairest of them all” would refer to the most just and capable leader, rather than the most beautiful.

But the row caused by those comments was nothing compared with the howls of outrage that greeted Disney’s decision not to cast seven little people to play Snow White’s faithful companions. To “avoid reinforcing stereotypes,” the studio said, the dwarfs would be replaced by CGI characters and renamed “magical creatures.” If Robert Iger thought that would be a good way to sidestep controversy, he was mistaken. Hundreds of little people are expected to descend on Hollywood this week to protest about being airbrushed out of the story.

Hundreds of little people are expected to descend on Hollywood this week to protest about being airbrushed out of the story

“The seven dwarfs were the stars of the original 1937 film which is a classic loved by millions of people,” Ali Chapman, a 3ft 8in American actress, told the Mail on Sunday. “Disney has made a live-action film and instead of giving seven talented little people the chance to shine, they’ve scrapped us completely and used CGI instead. There are a lot of angry little people, actors and actresses out there. People are flying in from all over the world to tell Disney this isn’t acceptable.”

To cap it all, Zegler has turned out to be an enthusiast for the Palestinian cause, adding the following sign-off to a social media post last year: “And always remember, free Palestine.” That has made for some awkward photo calls with her co-star Gal Gadot, a former Miss Israel who served in the Israel Defense Forces. It’s as if the film is cursed, destined to stumble over every woke trip-wire in its path.

Of course, it’s possible that Snow White will turn out to be the biggest blockbuster of the year and go on to sweep the Oscars in 2026. But judging from the trailers that seems unlikely. The mouse house has experienced some setbacks in the past few years, with its attempt to modernize the Marvel franchise by introducing trans superheroes proving to be a disaster. If its latest remake turns out to be a colossal bomb, let’s hope that Disney learns its lesson and leaves all the woke gobbledygook on the cutting room floor in future.