How Disney's Snow White remake became a $270 million headache

Telegraph

06-03-2025

Mirror, mirror, on the wall, what's the most contentious blockbuster of them all? On any list of the most trouble-plagued releases in recent Hollywood history, Disney's live-action remake of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs would surely rank heigh-ho, heigh-ho highly. The $270 million-budget spectacle, starring Rachel Zegler as the storybook princess, finally hits cinemas this month after four years of seemingly never-ending online fury and negative news stories.
From calls to boycott the film and attacks over its alleged 'f______ backward' depiction of little people, all the way to the sight this weekend of the movie's two biggest stars onstage at the Oscars, supposedly refusing to make eye contact with each other over disagreements about Gaza, this is a film beset by controversies. Controversies that, even with a magical, fortune-telling looking-glass like the one hung in the Evil Queen's castle, Disney could hardly have seen coming.
After all, 2025's Snow White was meant to be an easy win for the studio. That's how it was regarded both internally at Disney and throughout Hollywood when it was announced nine years ago, on the back of other live-action remakes of Mouse House classics derided as lazy by critics but lapped up by audiences. 2010's Alice In Wonderland and 2016's The Jungle Book each surpassed a billion at the box office, with another, 2017's Beauty and the Beast, on the horizon when Snow White was announced in October 2016.
It stood to reason that a live-action retelling of Walt Disney's first feature film would follow those other remakes' achievements and perhaps even surpass them. 1937's Snow White is the story on which a beloved entertainment empire was built. The prospect of this remake being released in time for the company's 100th anniversary in 2023 had insiders at the time whispering about the bolstered commercial potential of the project. What better moment for audiences to revisit the original Disney fairytale than during the company's centenary, with nostalgia for their romantic storytelling at fever pitch?
Early expectations were high. Barbie auteur Greta Gerwig was initially hired as a co-writer – involvement that ultimately amounted to just a 'couple of weeks' work… I wrote some jokes,' she explained in 2023. Instead, the film – directed by The Amazing Spider-Man's Marc Webb, from a script by The Girl On The Train writer Erin Cressida Wilson – limps into cinemas years later than originally planned, bloodied and bruised from one of the most depressing production periods in memory.
The battering began in 2021, with the casting of West Side Story actress Rachel Zegler as the titular princess. Her status as one of the brightest new stars in Hollywood, acclaimed by the likes of Steven Spielberg for her musical chops as well as her acting abilities, did little to quell the rage of political commentators incensed by the idea of an actress of Latina heritage playing a children's cartoon character once depicted as Caucasian, in a film released eight decades ago.
Two years earlier, Black actress Halle Bailey had been savaged by trolls after being cast as Ariel in another Disney live-action remake, The Little Mermaid. Zegler's casting was further proof to the same self-described culture war activists that 'woke' Hollywood was waging some sort of war on whiteness, leading to 'harassment from a certain group of people,' Zegler told Cosmopolitan earlier this year. 'They were showing up at my apartment and screaming profanities… for being brown. For having brown skin [and] playing Snow White.'
In 2023, Zegler was further attacked for appearing to criticise the 1937 Snow White, which she labelled 'extremely dated when it comes to the ideas of women being in roles of power and what a woman is fit for' in an interview at Disney's D23 convention. The original film was, by today's standards of consent, a 'love story with a guy who literally stalks her,' she explained. The upcoming modern rework of the tale, the actress announced, would feature a more empowered princess, who's 'not going to be saved by the prince'.
This Snow White – no longer named such because of the fairness of her skin, but because she survived a snow storm as a child – 'dreams about becoming the leader she knows she can be if she's fearless, fair, brave and true,' she added, in comments met with scorn on social media.
The problem was a perceived ingratitude. Here was a young star being handed the chance to play a hallowed character in our shared pop culture history, detractors complained. Instead of being excited at the prospect, Zegler was accused of being dismissive of the Snow White that fans had grown up watching. The 91-year-old son of the original film's director, David Hand, labelled her approach to the character 'a disgrace,' accusing Disney of 'making up new woke things. I think Walt and [Hand] would be turning in their graves.' American right-wing channel the Daily Wire meanwhile was so outraged that it announced that it would soon be making its own 'anti-woke' adaptation of the Snow White fairytale to rival Disney's – a project that has since been cancelled.
A factor in the level of vitriol aimed at Zegler by conservative outlets was undoubtedly her vocal support for left-wing causes, crescendoing in November 2024 when Zegler tweeted her wish that 'Trump supporters and Trump voters and Trump himself never know peace' – comments she later apologised for. But while there was sympathy from left-wing pundits for the actress herself following the abuse she received, there appeared little interest from the left in mounting a defence of the Snow White remake project as a whole.
Instead, concerns were mounting on that side of the political divide about this new film's representation of little people. In 2022, Game of Thrones actor Peter Dinklage sparked a conversation about Disney's alleged hypocrisy in framing the film as somehow progressive, when damaging stereotypes about people of short stature are baked into the DNA of the Snow White story. 'I was a little taken aback by [the fact] they were very proud to cast a Latina actress as Snow White,' Dinklage told podcaster Marc Maron, 'but you're still making that f–king backward story of seven dwarves living in a cave.'
Disney quickly issued a statement assuring fans that '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.' But early promo images of the movie, showing Zegler's Snow White surrounded by cartoonish CGI depictions of Doc, Grumpy, Happy, Sleepy, Bashful, Sneezy and Dopey did little to convince doubters that the film would be the sensitive step-forward in representation Disney was promising. Would it not be a greater showing of commitment to the dwarfism community to use actual actors of short stature, instead of conjuring up caricatured versions of them on computers?
Perhaps members of the dwarfism community should be relieved they were featuring in the film at all, some remarked. In July 2023, leaked photos from the movie's shoot in Bedfordshire, England depicted Snow White walking through an idyllic field, followed not by seven little people, but by an ethnically diverse mix of friends – leading some to speculate that the film was no longer Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, but Snow White and the Seven 'Magical Companions', to borrow a phrase Disney had been sprinkling into marketing materials around the film.
None of this did much to dispel worries that this Snow White remake – from a pure filmmaking perspective – looked quite simply like a bad movie. Projects like 2019's The Lion King and 2022's Dumbo have been criticised in recent years for their flat visuals and reliance on cheap green screen, compared to the vibrancy and imagination of the animated originals.
Early glimpses at Snow White, critics claimed, showed an altogether new garishness and lack of imagination. 'One of the most egregiously awful trailers I've ever laid eyes on,' was American magazine Forbes' response to the first promo for the film. 'From the nightmarish CGI dwarfs to the oversaturated visuals… Snow White combines everything wrong with modern filmmaking into one hideous monstrosity.'
The cards, then, were already stacked against Snow White. Typically, in situations where audiences are expecting a movie to be bad, though, studios have an ace up their sleeves: the film's A-list stars, who will usually put on a united front and hit the promo trail together, telling outlets what a great movie it is, and what a fun time they had together making it.
Disney, however, has so far been seemingly unable to play that ace in the campaign to promote Snow White. At least, not without distracting social media speculation about alleged animosity between Zegler and her co-star, Israeli actress Gal Gadot, rooted in their disparate stances on the current conflict in Gaza.
Gadot – who plays the Evil Queen in Snow White – is a former IDF soldier and supporter of Israel. Zegler, meanwhile, frequently uses her social media channels to advocate for human rights in Gaza; accompanying her tweets celebrating the launch of the Snow White trailer last August was a reminder to 'always remember, Free Palestine.'
As a result, speculation has been rampant about the pair's working relationship. At the Academy Awards, in a rare appearance together, Zegler and Gadot appeared on stage to present the award for Best Visual Effects. Within hours, social media platform TikTok was full of videos interpreting their body language as supposed evidence of acrimony between the co-stars.
None of which makes for ideal conditions to release a blockbuster – least of all one with a $270m budget to try and recoup in a cultural moment where audiences seldom turn out en masse for movies in theatres anymore, unless they feel like a must-see event. The studio, though, can at least comfort themselves in the knowledge that they've been here before, on the eve of releasing a movie titled Snow White, with a sense of schadenfreude looking over proceedings as bad actors salivate over the prospect of the release resulting in embarrassment.
To make the 1937 original, Walt Disney – who'd already experienced one bankruptcy – took out another loan, increasing his total debt to $1.3m (the equivalent of $25m today). Everyone thought it would be a disaster. The project was famously described by Hollywood folk suspicious of this rising mogul and his medium of choice as 'Disney's folly.' There had never been a cartoon before that lasted more than a few minutes and some predicted that his plan to make a feature-length animation would cause audience members' eyes to hurt from the strain of the bright colours for over an hour.
We all know how that Snow White turned out. The film generated $8m at the box office – some achievement, considering that tickets then cost about 20c for adults, with kids admitted for a dime – and a movie-making empire was born. Can this Snow White prove a similar surprise?
It's not out of the realm of possibility. Early tracking for the film does not indicate a box office bomb, leading to suspicions that a lot of less chronically online mainstream audience members are either unaware of or unbothered by the soap operas that have befallen Snow White's production. Experts are forecasting a $58 million opening weekend for the film, which, while not fantastic – Disney's 2019 remake of Aladdin made over $90 million across its first three days in cinemas – would not represent disaster, either.
What feels inarguable for most parties is that the film's release can't come soon enough. Not because cinephiles are bursting with excitement to see the film – they're not – but because the story of Snow White's rollout has held up a mirror. A metaphorical one, rather than a magical, fortune-telling one like the Evil Queen's, but a mirror all the same, to the ugliness of online discourse and the hollow half-heartedness of Hollywood when it often comes to studios' engagement in progressive politics.
After the challenges of Snow White, Disney may well be left whistling while they work out a new path forward for their live action remakes.