The woke Snow White is dead on arrival

Before Disney’s live-action remake of Snow White has even hit the big screen, it has been swamped in endless controversy. Now, this big-budget film won’t even be getting a UK premiere, supposedly out of fear of an ‘anti-woke’ backlash.

Normally, a film with Disney’s imprint and with Snow White’s budget (somewhere around $240million) would receive a Leicester Square premiere ahead of its release. But an insider told the Daily Mail last week that this will no longer go ahead as planned later this month, because Disney is ‘anticipating an anti-woke backlash… and [has] reduced the media schedule to just a handful of tightly controlled press events’. This is partially in order to ‘minimise the amount of press questions that Rachel Zegler’, the actress playing the titular princess, can receive.

Indeed, Zegler is a big reason why Snow White has attracted so much flak before its release. In a 2022 interview, she made the curious decision to lambast the original Disney classic her film is based on, calling it ‘dated’ and the love story ‘weird’. She even claimed that love interest Prince Charming ‘literally stalks’ Snow White in the original story. As a result, Zegler said, the remake will focus less on ‘true love’ and more on ‘women being in roles of power’. Only time will tell whether the kids want a ‘girlboss’ instead of a fairytale princess.

As well as taking swipes at the very story she’s supposed to be telling, Zegler recently insulted a large portion of Disney’s audience more directly. In the immediate aftermath of the US presidential election last year, she posted on Instagram that there was a ‘deep, deep sickness’ in the country. She took aim directly at the 77million Americans who voted for Donald Trump, saying that she hoped ‘Trump supporters and Trump voters and Trump himself never know peace’. She later apologised for her comments, but the damage was done, with many Trump supporters vowing to boycott the movie.

Snow White’s frosty reception can’t be put down to Zegler alone, however. When the official trailers were released last year, fans couldn’t help but notice just how ugly they looked. Chief complaints were the unconvincing CGI, terrible lighting and downright hideous costumes. As a result, the first trailer received around 1.4million dislikes on YouTube, and the second almost 900,000 dislikes.

Most visually offensive is the film’s depiction of the seven dwarves who, unlike all the other characters, aren’t represented by human actors but by janky-looking CGI. The question of how to portray the dwarves seemed to cause no end of headaches. In 2022, Peter Dinklage, a prominent actor with dwarfism, criticised Disney for planning to remake what he described as a ‘backward story of seven dwarves living in a cave together’. In response, Disney committed to taking ‘a different approach’ to the traditional depiction of the seven dwarves, in order to ‘avoid reinforcing stereotypes’. Pictures of a merry band of race-, gender-, and height-diverse characters on set emerged shortly afterwards in the press. But these generated their own backlash, and so they were replaced with CGI. Actors with dwarfism have since criticised Disney for taking away seven dwarf acting roles.

Disney isn’t even calling the characters ‘dwarves’ any more, but rather ‘magical creatures’. As such, any reference to dwarves has been dropped from the title. Snow White and the Seven Magical Creatures never had quite the same ring to it.

Now that Disney has cancelled Snow White’s London premiere, clearly the best it can hope for is that this multimillion-dollar remake can be quietly slipped out with as few people noticing as possible. Surely not the fairytale ending that Disney had hoped for.

Lauren Smith is a staff writer at spiked.