Cursed: How Disney’s plans to bring Snow White back to life went awry

In the Disney pantheon, Snow White is the fairest of them all. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), was the first animated feature released by the studio; the first to be made using cel animation (in which images are drawn or painted onto celluloid sheets – what we now call “traditional animation”); the first to win an Oscar; still the most successful animated film ever released in terms of ticket sales (109 million in North America alone, according to boxofficemojo); and the 10th-highest-grossing film ever (almost $2.3 billion in inflation-adjusted terms).

Given all that, it was inevitable the studio would eventually wave its magic wand over this sleeping giant in the hope a live-action remake would entrance a whole new generation (or three) of impressionable young fans and merch buyers.

Who could have known the project would be so cursed?

Disney’s Snow White, as it is officially called, opens this week. Few have yet seen it, and it has every chance of making a mockery of the doomsayers by doing stellar business. But if it does, the studio will breathe a massive sigh of relief, because just about everything that could have gone wrong so far has.

This is not a love story: Jonathan (Andrew Burnap) and Snow White (Rachel Zegler).

The start of production was delayed by COVID, and its release was pushed back a year by a combination of reshoots, complicated post-production and the US writers’ strike. In between it has been criticised for its casting choices and for both sticking to the original story and deviating from it. It has been accused of being both out of touch and way too woke.

Meanwhile, its lead actors – Rachel Zegler as the cursed princess and Gal Gadot as the evil queen – have become embroiled in the hottest of hot-button issues, taking opposing positions on the war in Gaza. They have done virtually no press, together or alone. When they appeared together on stage at the Oscars last month, they did not look at each other once.

This is a film that has been nine years in the making, whose final cost could reach $US300 million ($474 million). It is a crucial part of the studio’s strategy of revivifying its back catalogue of traditional hand-drawn animation by reimagining the properties as CGI or live-action (or a weird hybrid of both, as per Jon Favreau’s The Jungle Book and The Lion King).

To market it will probably cost a minimum of $US100 million. To make a profit, then, Disney will need to see it take at least $US700 million at the box office.

So why, then, does it appear to some seasoned observers as if the studio would rather pretend the release is not happening at all?

Fans and the dwarfism community have been equally aghast at the film’s treatment of the seven dwarfs.Credit: Disney

There was an invite-only launch party last week at the Alcazar Segovia, a real-life medieval castle north of Madrid that was the inspiration for the queen’s castle in the animated original. In Australia, there’s a Snow White “activation” in Sydney, where you can sip on themed drinks while wandering through an enchanted forest. In Los Angeles, the stars will attend a small red-carpet event, but don’t expect any probing interviews. As in Segovia, there will be no press, only Disney’s media team and some social media influencers present.

This low-key approach prompted one anonymous “exhibition source” quoted by The Hollywood Reporter last week to suggest the studio had the lowest of expectations for the film.

“They’ve been going through the motions on Snow White, all but saying, ‘We need to get this thing over with,’” the source told the industry outlet. “An advance sales cycle of less than two weeks just screams, ‘We have zero faith in this thing.’”

In truth, it’s not that Disney doesn’t have faith in “this thing”. It’s that it is probably braced for a wave of toxic pushback. People have been hating on this reimagining of Snow White almost since the day it was announced.

Plans for a live-action remake of the studio’s most sacred property were announced in October 2016, and by October 2019 it was in pre-production. But any hopes of shooting it the following year were derailed by COVID. Not a great start.

In June 2021, amid signs that the worst of the pandemic might finally be over, Rachel Zegler was announced as the film’s star. She was just 19 years old, and had yet to appear in her breakthrough role as Maria in Steven Spielberg’s remake of West Side Story , but the haters made no allowance for inexperience or vulnerability. Her ethnicity (she has Colombian and Polish ancestry) made her all wrong for the role of a girl with “skin as white as snow, lips as red as blood and hair as black as ebony” (as the Brothers Grimm described her in their 1812 version of the story), according to the right-wing trolls.

Rachel Zegler sings at the European launch of Snow White, in Segovia, Spain.Credit: Getty Images for Disney

That response echoed the negativity around the 2019 casting of Halle Bailey as Ariel in the live-action remake of The Little Mermaid, and fed into a broader narrative of Disney being excessively “woke” in its colour-blind and LGBTQ-friendly approach.

The rumblings on that front intensified in 2023 as the company became embroiled in a bitter legal fight with conservative Republican governor Ron DeSantis over gender education in early childhood. While that dispute ultimately was about finances – DeSantis was threatening to rescind a special tax break for the company’s Florida theme park – soon, everything Disney touched was open to attack from an increasingly aggressive conservative lobby that has only grown louder with the second coming of Donald Trump.

In early 2022, video surfaced of an internal Disney meeting at which animation producer Latoya Raveneau discussed her “not at all secret gay agenda”. She was referring to the inclusion of positive depictions of LGBTQ characters in the studio’s movies, but it was seized upon by conservatives as evidence that Disney was “grooming” and “sexualising” young children through its content.

None of this was specifically about Snow White, but it fed a perception that the studio was unpicking its “neutral” (ie, white, straight) history in favour of a “distorted” woke narrative of diversity, equity and inclusion.

Suspicions that Disney was planning to “wokify” Snow White were heightened in September 2022 when Zegler told Variety “we absolutely wrote a Snow White that is not gonna be saved by the prince”. Her observation that “we have a different approach” to a movie that came out in 1937 was seen in some quarters as an utter betrayal of everything pure and good in the world.

Peter Dinklage, with his wife Erica Schmidt, took aim at the idea of Disney resurfacing tired old tropes about dwarfism. Credit: Getty Images

It can’t be overstated just how much of a bind all this is for Disney as it seeks to modernise its properties to respond to a world in which a white, straight audience comprises a part, not the whole, of its market. The legacy is important, but it also acts as a ball and chain. However, unshackling risks losing a still substantial chunk of its base.

But going for diversity poses its own challenges, too.

In January 2022, Game of Thrones star Peter Dinklage took aim at the remake – long before any solid information on it had appeared – for resurfacing tired old tropes about little people, who would still presumably carry the names Sleepy, Happy, Grumpy, Dopey et al.

“You’re progressive in one way,” he told podcaster Marc Maron, referring to the casting of Zegler, “but then you’re still making that f---ing backward story about seven dwarfs living in a cave together. What the f--- are you doing, man?”

Disney swiftly responded that it was “taking a different approach with these seven characters” and was “consulting with members of the dwarfism community”. It would use CGI to create “magical creatures” rather than the dwarfs of yore.

And that angered some in the little people community. Terra Jolé, star and producer of reality series Little Women: LA, spoke for many when she said that objections to negative depictions of little people had resulted not in better depictions but fewer.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) was Walt Disney’s first animated feature. Credit: Disney

When photos emerged from the set in July 2023 showing the actors playing the dwarfs, there was a whole new round of outrage: four of them were people of colour, one was female, and only one was actually short-statured.

The conservative press labelled it “politically correct” casting, while the worst fears of Jolé and others were confirmed.

Insult was added to injury last August with the first look at the film itself: there were the “magical creatures” – seven dwarfs, rendered via CGI, presumably using that diverse group of mostly average-sized actors for performance capture.

Even events entirely outside Disney’s control have conspired to make the launch of Disney’s Snow White a fraught exercise, with the opposing positions of Gadot and Zegler vis a vis Gaza, a topic the studio would desperately want not to surface during interviews.

Gal Gadot as the Evil Queen in Disney’s Snow White.Credit: Disney

All of which brings us to the launch that isn’t a launch.

“It really isn’t going to be a red carpet,” Martin Klebba, a dwarf actor who voices Grumpy (and was spotted in those leaked photos in 2023), told The Hollywood Reporter this week. “It’s basically going to be a pre-party, watch the movie, and that’s it. There’s not going to be this whole hoopla of, ‘Disney’s first f---ing movie they ever made.’ Because of all this controversy, they’re afraid of the blowback from different people in society.”

Last weekend, Disney held a screening in LA, to which hand-picked media (mostly fan and Disney-friendly outlets) and influencers were invited, rather than the mainstream entertainment media. Unsurprisingly, the “reviews” were pretty positive.

It was a blatant attempt to wrest control of the narrative away from the naysayers, to create a sense of positivity around the film as it staggers out into the world. Soon enough, though, it will be on its own, exposed to the unfiltered takes of actual critics, reviewers, fans and haters. Whether it’s happily ever after or not we’ll soon see.

Disney’s Snow White opens on March 20.