Disney’s Snow White Is Well on Its Way to Disaster at the Box Office
It’s been too long since Disney has given its viewers a reason to complain. Take Thanksgiving weekend, when it actually pulled off a decent release. Moana 2 made $386 million at the global box office, breaking opening weekend records for an animated movie, and nobody on X seemed to have anything more than canned complaints about it.
After watching the trailer, it looks like everything anyone could want from a Disney princess sequel: It’s as beautiful as the original, there are cute animals and cuter kids, and the storyline is probably a rehash of the first one (don’t fix what’s not broken, right?). As far as Disney princesses go, Moana has successfully made the tribe without ruffling anyone’s feathers — well, except that I can’t say “you’re welcome” without doing so in a sing-songy voice. Thanks, Mauwi. (READ MORE: The Penguin Glides as 2024’s Best Drama)
Box office success and audience acclaim will not be the story of Disney’s live-action Snow White release, currently scheduled for March 2025. The film was already pushed back a year, although purportedly because of the SAG-AFTRA strikes in 2023 and not because of the controversy that it stirred up online (thanks Rachel Zegler). Perhaps Disney had hoped that giving it a little more time would cool tempers. If anything, it’s made the problem worse.
Both the Right and the Left Boycott Disney’s Snow White
This past December, Disney dropped the official trailer for Snow White, and it’s going to be a disaster. Putting aside the fact that Rachel Zegler looks nothing like anyone’s imagination of this particular fairy tale princess (which is something of a pedantic criticism, and certainly not worth boycotting a film over), Zegler was cast alongside Gal Gadot, who plays the evil witch. Anyone could have told you that, barring some serious work on the part of the wardrobe department, that wasn’t going to work.
Gadot, famous for her role as Wonder Woman, is an absolutely stunning actress. Disney’s wardrobe department didn’t do its job, and the result is that when Gadot asks the mirror on the wall who’s the fairest of them all, the audience in the YouTube comments responds en masse, “You are.” As one YouTube commenter noted, “I wanted the queen to win in this version.” (READ MORE: MAGA Animal House)
That’s not the only problem Gadot poses for Disney. The Israeli-born actress, who is a former martial arts instructor for the Israeli Defence Force, is, as one might expect, pro-Israel, and she’s been very vocal about it. Last year, she helped put together a screening in Los Angeles of a video compilation of the atrocities committed by Hamas on Oct. 7, and the left-wing mob has been calling for a boycott of Snow White ever since.
Zegler, on the other hand, has posted slogans like “free palestine” on her social media. (One wonders how that is going down between Zegler and Gadot on the promotional tour.) That, together with Zegler’s blatant disregard and disrespect of the original fairy tale, has everyone else criticizing and boycotting the movie. Between the Right and the Left, it seems likely that no one will be sitting in theaters on March 21.
In 15 years, when the conflict in Gaza is relegated to the history books, most of us could probably get past some of the politicization surrounding the film. Unfortunately, we won’t be able to get past the bad storyline and the film’s ghoulish looks.
Snow White Remake Misses the Point of the Story
The CGI dwarves are, to put it lightly, an eyesore (not to mention, they put the actors who could have filled the roles out of a job, so that’s nice) and the whole movie has a beige tint — the forest is beige, the cottage is beige, the castle is beige. It’s like the cinematographers made a universal decision to use a beige filter on their cameras and the result is, quite frankly, blah.
In terms of storyline, Zegler promised audiences last year that, in Disney’s modern rewrite of the classic fairy tale, the princess wouldn’t be saved by the prince. Apparently, in the 21st century, Snow White is a girl boss.
The problem is that fairy tales are not so misogynistic that there aren’t princesses who save princes. Take The Snow Queen, where Gerda traipses across the northern world to win back her friend Kai, or Beauty and the Beast, where Beauty softens the heart of her captor and saves him from his curse. In both of these cases (and in many other examples), there’s a theme. Rather than picking up swords, they engage in a much more mysterious kind of warfare, that of love. (READ MORE: Wicked Bewitches and Beguiles at the Box Office)
There’s a reason princes get swords and princesses get hearts. Women have a particular gift for loving the unlovable. What they bring to the world is a beautiful softness that echoes the salvific love God had for men — corporations like Disney are not incapable of illustrating that beautifully, the animated Tangled does it well.
That’s not to say women can’t pick up swords — Judith, after all, cuts off the head of a tyrant, and Joan of Arc led armies against the English — but Snow White isn’t supposed to be Joan of Arc, she’s supposed to be the maltreated princess awakened to love by a kiss. Simply put, Snow White isn’t the kind of story where the princess saves the prince. Instead, it gives men permission to love women because they are beautiful both inwardly and outwardly, and it tells women that accepting love will awaken them to a new and beautiful life. Coincidentally, that’s a message the modern world needs to hear.
Disney’s Snow White seeks to betray that whole message. What Zegler and the executives at Disney are in the process of discovering is that our modern world is not yet so far gone that audiences don’t take note of and despise that betrayal.
The post Disney’s Snow White Is Well on Its Way to Disaster at the Box Office appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.