Yannow, Disney has destroyed almost everything it’s touched with Woke. Star Wars, Marvel, the classic movies, the Tragic Kingdom, Indiana Jones, all of it.
Now, they are panicking over Snow White. For that and how they’ve ruined all my favorite entertainment in just a few short years, they are the AOTW. I could have made it just Rachel Zeigler for what she did to Snow White, but it’s everything Disney touches.
All signs are pointing to a box office catastrophe for Disney’s new Snow White, and Hollywood is in full-blown panic mode. It’s not just Disney feeling the heat—Tinseltown, already drowning in a sea of big-budget flops, can’t afford another messy release. But that’s exactly what’s coming, as early signs suggest this woke remake is heading straight for a long, grim, and very unprofitable sleep.
Of course, casting a Hispanic liberal to play a white, German fairytale icon was one of Disney’s dumbest moves—right up there with ditching the dwarfs for diversity hire hobos, only to backtrack and digitally add the little guys later. What a mess.
Who could forget Rachel Zegler’s personal mission to literally trash Snow White’s original story—rewriting Prince Charming as some kind of #MeToo-type stalker?
The movie, now set to open nation-wide on March 21st, is in free fall, starting with the bizarre premiere, which was altered from start to finish, in order to avoid more anti-woke backlash.
Much effort was made to force the original tale into the contemporary moral mould of antebellum America. Now, as Disney braces for the release of its new live-action adaptation on Friday, a similar process is underway. This time, the sanitising is motivated by its star, Rachel Zegler, who has navigated the press junket so disastrously that studio bosses relocated a London premiere to a remote Spanish castle for fear of “anti-woke backlash”. All this was set in motion by Zegler’s comments in 2022, that the original film had followed Snow White’s “love story with a guy who literally stalks her. Weird.” Taking a further chomp at the hand which was so generously feeding her, she added: “I think I watched it once and never picked it up again.” This time around, Zegler promised, Snow White would not be dreaming “about true love”, but “about becoming the leader she knows she can be”, a phrase which single-handedly tanked the $270-million film’s predicted box-office performance.
Disney is making the same fatal mistake that sunk Sports Illustrated and Victoria’s Secret—abandoning the fantasy that made them successful in the first place. Once upon a time, Disney’s core message was very simple: fairytales really do come true. Beautiful, right? And that’s the magic people bought into. But just like SI and VS ditched the dream of aspirational beauty—swapping out beautiful bombshells for below-average fat chicks—Disney is tossing out the timeless romance of a prince on a white horse, rescuing a woman in distress. Instead, they’re choking us to death with some contrived “girl power” nonsense that lacks charm, romance, or magic—ironically, all the things that made Disney movies beloved in the first place. The Unherd piece goes on:
Disney’s dalliances with “wokeness” are well documented, and tiresome. In 2023, its casting of the black actress Halle Bailey as Ariel in The Little Mermaid sparked outrage, much of it racist. Its megabucks Marvel franchise has attracted similar opprobrium. The conversation around Snow White, however, is summarised by outrage from the warriors of Mumsnet, who insist “there’s nothing wrong with dreaming of marriage”, and “I don’t understand why a man loving a woman is bad at all!” The lens of criticism is so relentlessly trained on the film’s feminism or lack of it that the underlying assumption is taken for granted: that mass-market cinema must contain a message, and that its plots can be used as a weathervane for contemporary sexual or racial politics.
Disney thought it was making history by embracing girl power and riding the wave of a so-called “progressive movement.” But here’s the problem—they got high on their own supply. They didn’t stop to realize that this wasn’t some organic, world-changing revolution. It was a manufactured guilt trip, pushed by Hollywood elites desperate to atone for the filth and perversion they’ve let fester in their own backyards. What Disney completely missed is that the rest of America doesn’t live in that filth. We’re just normal people who love escaping into a beautiful fantasy—romance, adventure, and the feel-good magic that made Disney iconic in the first place.
So, the crisis and the box office collapse? It’s well-earned. Couldn’t have happened to a more deserving bunch of out-of-touch jerks.
Taken on its own merit, a movie premiere is pretty much incapable of dictating a film’s box-office fate. But according to rival studio executives and film marketers canvassed by Vulture, certain premieres can provide tantalizing indications of what’s to come. Disney’s red-carpet restrictions — taken in conjunction with the studio’s unorthodox decision to begin preselling tickets to Snow White via online retailers like Fandango and Atom Tickets a mere 11 days before its release — paint a picture of a movie in crisis. Under normal circumstances, an event title with almost a century of household-name recognition and a $450 million price tag (when you include prints and advertising costs) would begin selling tickets at least a month in advance. “That’s data. The only reason why they would start presales that late is they are worried people would write about, Oh, man, the tickets are on sale and they’re not doing well,” an executive at another major studio says of Disney. “That and scrapping the red carpet tell me a story. It’s almost like they’re running away from the movie. And at this budget, that’s kind of crazy.”
Of course, few movies arrive onscreen with as much cultural Sturm und Drang as director Marc Webb’s megabudget contemporization of 1937’s epochal Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Its bibliography of outrage includes: anti-diversity outcry in 2021 that greeted the casting of mixed-race Latina actress Zegler as its titular heroine (whose skin is described as “white as snow” in the original animated film); Peter Dinklage lambasting the film’s perceived insensitivity toward little people — specifically, its “fucking backwards story about seven dwarfs living in a cave”; Zegler’s 2023 multi-interview characterization of the original Snow White as “extremely dated when it comes to the idea of women in roles of power” and “focus on a love story with a guy who literally stalks her” (she also noted, “People are making these jokes about ours being the PC Snow White, where it’s like, yeah, it is — because it needed that”); and seemingly conflicting views of the Israel-Hamas war by Zegler (who has described herself as “pro-Palestine”) and Gadot (who served in the Israeli Defense Forces and used her keynote speech at a recent Anti-Defamation League summit to denounce those not “condemning Hamas, but celebrating, justifying, and cheering on a massacre of Jews”).
The biggest problem for Snow White, though, is Zelger’s attack on Trump supporters, and something she and the film can likely not rebound from. Add to that, the utter crash and burn of Disney’s other “woke” box office flop, “Captain America,” starring a black guy, whose only purpose was to check a DEI box for the industry. America, said, “No thanks.” The Vulture piece goes on.
Perhaps most problematic for Disney’s marketing apparatus, however, was then-23-year-old Zegler’s anguished reaction to President Trump’s election in November. “May Trump supporters and Trump voters and Trump himself never know peace,” she wrote in an Instagram post. “Fuck Donald Trump.” After supporters of the president responded on social media with postings such as, “Not taking my kids to see this trash after the statement you put out. @disney you need to do something about this” and “I hope you get no peace when this film BOMBS at the box office and streaming,” Zegler issued a hasty apology. But some rival studio executives ultimately feel the Mouse House made a tactical mistake in casting the outspoken Romeo + Juliet actress and failing to rein her in. “The reality is Rachel Zegler should not be playing Snow White,” one tells me.
Snow White makes theatrical landfall at something of a corporate inflection point for Disney. Last month’s Marvel Cinematic Universe entry Captain America: Brave New World has underperformed financially, becoming one of the long-running franchise’s lowest-earning titles.
Delusions of Adequacy 