Walt Disney’s live-action remake of its 1937 classic Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs opens in cinemas on Friday, trailed by controversies that have dragged the company back into the culture wars — a fate chief executive Bob Iger has been trying to avoid.
Snow White actress Rachel Zegler has faced online attacks from people who said her Colombian heritage made her unsuited for the role. She drew criticism for saying the original film was outdated, and later for online posts about US President Donald Trump and his supporters — providing ammunition to critics of “woke” Disney.
Meanwhile, Zegler and Gal Gadot, the Israeli actress who plays the Evil Queen, are on opposite sides of the Israel-Gaza conflict, creating an air of tension around the film.
The controversies appear to have dented box office prospects for Snow White, which is estimated to have cost $270mn to make. “Early on, the opening weekend projections were much higher, but have now dropped to about $45mn to $50mn in the US and maybe $100mn globally for its debut,” said Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst at Comscore.
After a brief retirement, Iger returned to Disney in 2022 amid a dispute with Florida’s governor over gay and transgender issues. Since then he has sought to lessen the company’s political risk, including telling filmmakers to go easy on social messaging. But the Brothers Grimm tale of a princess’s fate at the hands of an evil queen has resurrected controversies dating back to the film’s inception nearly a decade ago.
Disney has been in damage-control mode. The company restricted media access to the film’s stars at the Hollywood premiere last weekend, and it opted for northern Spain instead of a splashy location such as London’s Leicester Square for its European rollout.
It sought to build early buzz by promoting it twice at its D23 conferences for Disney superfans, a safe space. Zegler also made a promotional trip to Tokyo, where a big fan base is less concerned about “woke” politics.
“We can’t fight the culture wars,” said a Disney executive. “Everybody criticising this movie was never going to see this movie. Disney isn’t going to change minds.”
Disney began planning for an updated live action version of Snow White in 2016. The company had found success by refreshing other titles from its library, including 101 Dalmatians, Aladdin and The Jungle Book, which introduced old characters to new audiences — and capitalised on proven stories it owned. Some have been blockbusters, including Alice in Wonderland in 2010 and Beauty and the Beast in 2017, both of which ultimately grossed more than $1bn apiece.
Yet as the “woke” backlash gathered force in recent years, another Disney remake suffered a backlash similar to that Zegler and Snow White now face. Halle Bailey, the Black actress who starred in the live action version of Little Mermaid released in 2023, faced racist taunts from fans angry that the role of Ariel was not played by a white actress.
The company has long been a target over its positions on social issues. Southern Baptists launched a boycott of Disney in 1997 after it provided insurance benefits to employees with same-sex partners. But the pressure reached new levels of intensity in 2022 during the “Don’t Say Gay” controversy in Florida.
The company came out in opposition to a law restricting discussions about gay issues in public schools following outcry from its employees in the state, where its Walt Disney World theme park makes it Florida’s largest employer. In response, governor Ron DeSantis, who had labelled the company “woke Disney”, took away its ability to govern the area around its theme parks, as it had done since the 1960s.
Since then, Iger has sought to lower the political temperature. “We have to entertain first. It’s not about messages,” he said at a conference in 2023.
Some inside the company see a connection between the dramatic societal changes in recent years — from #MeToo and Black Lives Matter to the anti-woke backlash — and the controversies that have engulfed Snow White. “The culture shifted under our feet” since the film was greenlit, the Disney executive said.
Given the age of the Snow White story and the sensitivity around having comical dwarfs as central characters, there was always going to be some risk involved in a remake. But the film had a strong cast: Zegler showed off her voice in Steven Spielberg’s well-received 2021 version of West Side Story, and Gadot was the star of Wonder Woman and other box office hits.
In a 2022 interview with Vanity Fair, Zegler said she had heard jokes about being in a “politically correct” version of Snow White. “It’s an 85-year-old cartoon, and our version is a refreshing story about a young woman who has a function beyond ‘Someday My Prince Will Come’,” she said, referring to the song from the 1937 version. Her comment that the prince “literally stalks” the princess in the 1937 film also rankled older fans.
The same year, the actor Peter Dinklage, who has a form of dwarfism, attacked the project.
He said the filmmakers were “very proud to cast a Latina actress” as Snow White “but you’re still telling the story of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”. The filmmakers were still making a “backwards story of seven dwarfs living in a cave together”, he said on the WTF with Marc Maron Podcast. (Disney said it consulted “with members of the dwarfism community” and planned a “different approach”.)
Then there is the Israel conflict. Gadot, who served in the Israel Defense Forces, has publicly supported the country since it was attacked by Hamas on October 7 2023. Zegler has expressed support for Palestine, including in a post on X following the release of the Snow White trailer that said: “And always remember, free palestine.”
Reviews have been mixed. New York Times critic Manohla Dargis called it “perfectly adequate” while labelling the criticism “a dispiritingly familiar spectacle of bigotry and nonsense”. The New York Post declared it “Heigh-ho-hum” and gave it two stars. Financial Times’ reviewer Danny Leigh awarded three, saying Zegler brings “wit and zip” but the film is “risk-averse to the point of blandness”.
