Even if I saw it―which I won't―and it turned out to be really good―which it wouldn't―Disney's new Snow White would stand as an encapsulation of just about everything wrong with the movie industry today. Not because of what's made everyone freak out: lead actress Rachel Zegler's comments on the original and the fairy tale back in 2022. It doesn't matter that Zegler is a sorority pseudointellectual. She'll grow out of it.
But start with the phrase "Disney's new Snow White." The world does not need Disney to redo "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs." Walt nailed it during the Great Depression. But Disney, the world's richest and most powerful media company, has started on the project of rehashing all their old hits, and they're not going to stop now.
Then consider that the cast was being grilled on production in 2022, and it's just coming out now in 2025. Let's be real. It does not take three years to shoot a movie. Not even if you count postproduction. What takes multiple years is scheduling. Getting permission from corporate HQ to release the damn thing. Because where Hollywood was once run by tyrannical businessmen who liked and sometimes understood movies, now it's run by corporate drones who don't.
Finally there's the absurd business with the dwarves. By going from live little people to a diverse range of races and sizes to CGI they've pleased no one. It could be counted as a failure of nerve, had there ever been nerve to fail.
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It seems the major entertainment companies are all trying to find success by re-envisioning stories that were enjoyable the first time around. Uncle Walt likely wouldn't be happy with the situation at Disney. Once upon a time (that magical phrase) parents and children weren't being lectured to and everyone, including people who used to be children, are fed up with storylines mangled to fit 'progressive' narratives. There's only one way for disaffected audiences to fight back and that's to avoid the woke slop that Disney in particular has been serving.
I watched bits of interviews with Rachel Zegler who used every opportunity to trash the 1937 version as sexist and outdated calling the story 'weird'. She even accused Prince Charming of having ‘literally stalked’ Snow White. Zegler claims that this new, updated version will focus less on romance and ‘true love’, and more on ‘women being in roles of power’.
There have been complaints, often well-deserved, considering opinions and mores change over time, and 1937 was long ago. Many Disney movies were successful because they were made for the audience of their time. I don't care so much about Marvel but the old Disney films have become untouchable in my opinion. Young girls love princesses and adults feel nostalgia for a time long gone. Is it that the ideologues at the company now loathe its history and its audience?
Jer showed me an article that may make you chuckle too:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-12298801/EXCLUSIVE-Snow-White-Seven-Politically-Correct-Companions.html
While Walt Disney needed other people to form and execute his vision--notably Mickey Mouse cocreator Ub Iwerks--he did at the end of the day create something great. Unfortunately he's also a case in point for the fact that you can't do much to influence your creations once you're gone. And no one at Disney now has much vision on the one hand or reverence for the company's past on the other.
Sure, but she's just a cog in the wheel ultimately. It doesn't make much sense to blame her for the movie being awful or for audiences staying away. Actors running off at the mouth is not a new phenomenon, even if some of the content of what they say is more vapid than it used to be. I mainly feel sorry for them that they're supposed to regard slop like this as the highlight of their careers.
In some ways 1937 was a long time ago. On the other hand 1812, when the Grimm Brothers published their version of Snow White, was a greater amount of time from 1937. And versions had been kicking around before that. The point is that it used to be acknowledged that some themes were eternal. We seem to have cut ourselves off from the eternal and the sublime. The effects are showing.
You can tell the Daily Mail article is from two years ago because it shows the actors and not the hideous CGI dwarves they went with. Hard as it is to believe the ragtag assortment was as good as things were going to get.
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