The hits keep on coming for Disney, and most of these are self-inflicted and completely asked for.
In case you’ve forgotten, the Disney live-action remake of Snow White has been in the works for some time. It was supposed to drop a while back, but thanks to various controversies brought on by its lead actress, Rachel Zegler, Disney pushed it back, likely to do some reshoots and let some time pass in hopes that people will have forgotten about what Zegler said.
What did she say?
Zegler said she wasn’t a fan of the original Snow White and even spat on its legacy. She also made it clear that this would be something of a feminist remake, called Prince Charming a weird stalker, and was very hubristic while she did it.
(READ: Feminism Will Keep Disney’s Snow White Reboot Asleep at the Box Office)
The insult was enough to turn Zegler into a walking, talking PR nightmare that Disney had to rein in.
And now, after all this time, Disney finally dropped the trailer for the live-action Snow White, and… it already bombed. Watch it yourself, and you’ll immediately see all the issues with modern Disney front and center.
The first thing that stands out is that all of these scenes are so soaked in CGI that nothing looks particularly striking. CGI should be something that assists production, yet Disney uses it to such an extent that even the dwarves didn’t escape being animated. This is due, in part, to Hollywood A-lister Peter Dinklage calling it insulting to use real-life dwarfs to fill the roles with the seven dwarfs in the film:
“Literally no offense to anything, but I was sort of taken aback,” he said. “They were very proud to cast a Latino actress as Snow White, but you’re still telling the story of ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.’ Take a step back and look at what you’re doing there. It makes no sense to me. You’re progressive in one way, but you’re still making that f—ing backward story about seven dwarfs living in a cave together. Have I done nothing to advance the cause from my soapbox? I guess I’m not loud enough.”
This was rich coming from Dinklage, who played a fantasy dwarf in “The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian.” Talk about pulling the ladder up behind you. With one phrase, he took seven people out of a job that could have helped make their careers, including stunt doubles.
So you get CGI animals, CGI dwarfs, and CGI landscapes. If you’re going to make a live-action version of something, then what’s the point of having so much CGI?
There are some other oddities. Snow White’s hairstyle might have worked in the animated cartoon of long ago, but here it looks like Lord Farquaad from “Shrek.” That might be a nitpick, but I can’t stop seeing it.
I would say that the only character that looks dead-on here is Gal Gadot as the Evil Queen, but Gadot’s presence brings on a very interesting problem. She is a very, very beautiful woman, and Zegler isn’t as pretty as she is. This brings up a conundrum for the film, as the story revolves around the Queen’s jealousy toward Snow White as being the “fairest of them all.” I expect this to be addressed in the film somehow, and I’m pretty sure the answer is going to have something to do with modern-day takes on beauty.
The audience reaction to the trailer has already been devastating. Not only are the comments incredibly unkind to the film, but the like-to-dislike ratio is heavily weighted to the dislikes. Using a browser plug-in that puts the dislikes back on the screen, at the time of this writing, the trailer has over 59,000 likes, while the dislikes number over 346,000.
I’m sure that Disney put in a lot of work to make reshoots and rewrites during the extra time the film had, but we’ll see. If Disney does do anything, they’ll likely try to water it down from the original, turning it from a grand statement about the importance of feminism and girl power, which Zegler hyped it up to be, to being a bland reboot.
It will just be another skip-worthy Disney cash grab that will ultimately go down as being another entry in the darkest era of Disney.
