Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is the first movie I saw. I was three years old and I remember little of that magic afternoon with grandpa. But I know I was mesmerized: I’ve been hooked on movies ever since and I suppose many of you share the same memories. Could any live-action remake of the 1937 classic live up to my/your expectations? The surprise is not that Marc Webb’s Snow White couldn’t. It’s that it didn’t survive the storm(s) it faced.
I seldom pay attention to extratextual noise and content disclaimers –a movie should be loved/loathed solely on its merits– but here the noise got so loud it engulfed Snow White. Look it up on Youtube: From “the most disliked teaser” on the platform in August 2024, to the review bombing and the avalanche of parodies since its release on March 21 this year. All the more puzzling for a PG-rated family-movie, by definition non-divisive.
Which controversies have been plaguing the remake? Which factors have fueled the negative buzz? We identified seven, as many as the dwarfs no longer in the title. Some are “bupkes,” as Gleiberman calls them in Variety. Some aren’t.
The big budget
Production delays, extensive reshoots and a $250 million price tag (who knows how many millions in marketing costs) obviously raised the stakes and lengthen the road to profitability.
The franchise film (curse)
“Warner Bros. and Disney,” writes Ben Fritz in The Big Picture, “long ago reshaped their businesses around big-budget ‘event movies’ that could spawn endless sequels, spinoffs and product tie-ins (…) That means largely abandoning any type of film that costs less than $100 million, is based on an original idea or appeals to any group smaller than all the moviegoers around the globe.” [hence the PG rating]
Disney is successfully exploiting the cinematic universes of Marvel and Star Wars. No wonder it also wanted to milk its library of animated fairy tales, from Cinderella to Beauty and the Beast and Mulan and The Little Mermaid… Snow White, however, was already reimagined in 2012 by Relativity’s Mirror Mirror (with the dwarfs and the “true love kiss”) and by Universal’s Snow White and the Huntsman. Could a 2025 ‘update’ be a safe bet? Was there a danger of remake fatigue?
Snow White poster © Walt Disney Co.
The adaptation conundrum
Any live-action adaptation of an animated feature is fraught with inherent problems, oftentimes too great to solve: What makes poetic sense in a drawing may clash with the “laws of reality” (Todorov), the realism of human actors, the psychology of characters and the constraints of a physical set. What’s magical –animistic, even oneiric– in the animated archetype must find a somewhat ‘rational’ footing in the remake. Which may then discover it lost everything in translation.
To the filmmakers’ credit, many sequences are directly inspired –shot by shot– by the original (the huntsman, Snow White’s escape, the magic mirror…) Some capture the magic, others fall short.
The (denied) pleasure of repetition
Reimagining Snow White, Disney forgot what every parent knows and every child demands: fairy tales and bedtime stories must be retold/re-read exactly as they have been read/told again and again. Instead, Dopey talks, Snow White leads a rebellion and the Queen dies shattering the magic mirror. At the pre-party for the Hollywood premiere, dozens of girls put on their colorful Snow White costumes and a few boys dressed up as the prince –red cape, blue hat and everything. Imagine their dismay when they found the prince was replaced by a bandit named Jonathan! (Morey/Churchill’s song “Someday My Prince Will Come” is gone too)
The feminist lens
“It’s no longer 1937,” said Zegler in an interview with Variety, “and we absolutely wrote a Snow White that’s not gonna be saved by the Prince, and she’s not gonna be dreaming about true love. She’s dreaming about becoming the leader she knows she can be and the leader that her late father told her she could be, if she was fearless, fair, brave and true.”
In fact, not only she isn’t saved by the prince; she saves the bandit who replaced him and she overthrows the Evil Queen in a brand new, somewhat ‘preachy’ ending. Zegler is right, “it’s no longer 1937:” Integrating modern sensibilities, speaking to a new generation and turning Snow White into a “fearless” feminist heroine makes sense on paper –and it’s certainly welcome here at Playgirl. But honoring the original story –and the 1937 animated classic– while expanding upon it, carries its own perils. And it has (see above).
Politics and ideologies
Much ado about nothing. Does it matter that Rachel Zegler (Snow White) has shared her pro-Palestine views and Gal Gadot (the Evil Queen) her support for Israel? Neither of those opposing views has anything to do with Disney’s remake. Does it matter that Zegler commented on Trump’s election and criticized the 1937 classic? It does on social media. More polarized, more vitriolic than ever, social media has fueled the backlash against Zegler and her “woke” Snow White.
What of the heated debate on dwarf characters? First Peter Dinklage’s criticisms, then Disney’s response in The Hollywood Reporter: “To avoid reinforcing stereotypes from the original animated film, we are taking a different approach with these seven characters and have been consulting with members of the dwarfism community.” Finally, the not-so-brilliant solution of the CGI dwarfs –to the chagrin of said community. But if we knew none of this, would the CGI “magical creatures” be that different from the CGI animals?
I can’ t help but close with more ‘extratextual’ trivia, a 1984 movie and a question: why do the Gremlins watch (and sing along) Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs? “Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it’s home from work we go…”
