Rachel Zegler as Snow White in the latest live-action remake of the film. Photo / Disney
The dwarfs. The casting. The politics of the lead actress. And that wig! Is Disney’s live-action remake of the classic film doomed by culture war skirmishes?
Disney knew that remaking Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs as a live-action musical would be treacherous.
But the studio was feeling cocky.
It was 2019, and Disney was minting money at the box office by “reimagining” animated classics like Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast and The Jungle Book as movies with real actors. The remakes also made bedrock characters like Cinderella newly relevant. Heroines defined by ideas from another era – be pretty, and things might work out! – were empowered. Casting emphasised diversity.
Why not tackle Snow White?
Over the decades, Disney had tried to modernise her story – to make her more than a damsel in distress, one prized as “the fairest of them all” because of her “white as snow” skin. Twice, starting in the early 2000s, screenwriters had been unable to crack it, at least not to the satisfaction of an image-conscious Disney.
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which premiered in 1937, posed other remake challenges, including how to sensitively handle Happy, Sneezy, Sleepy, Dopey, Bashful, Grumpy and Doc.
Still, Disney executives were determined to figure it out.
“It’s going to be amazing, another big win,” Bob Chapek, then Disney’s CEO, said of a live-action Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs at a 2022 fan convention.
Instead, Snow White, starring Rachel Zegler, arrived in theatres as one of the most troubled projects in Disney’s 102-year history. The movie became a cautionary tale about relevance – how trying to strike the right cultural chord at the right cultural moment can turn a seemingly innocuous movie into a proxy battle for special interests. And just about everything that could go wrong did, resulting in a case study of the perils of big-budget moviemaking in a volatile, fast-moving world and the risks of trying to endlessly mine existing intellectual property.
This article is based on interviews with more than a dozen people involved with the film. Together, their accounts show how Snow White went from promising idea to poisoned apple, and how the entertainment giant and the film’s creative team scrambled to save it.
Perhaps the biggest challenge to the movie was the cultural shift that has taken place over the past several years.
In 2021, online trolls attacked Disney for casting Zegler, a Latina actor, as Snow White. But the pushback dissipated, and Disney shrugged it off. Inside the studio, executives were proud of the casting. The killing of George Floyd a year earlier by a police officer had roiled every sphere of American life, prompting institutions and individuals around the country to confront racism and inequity.
As Snow White finally comes to market, however, Disney finds itself in a very different climate. Companies, including Disney, have raced to distance themselves from diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives amid a broader backlash toward DEI policies by President Donald Trump.
The tumult around Snow White had grown so intense by the movie’s premiere in Los Angeles in March that Disney heightened security and curtailed red carpet interviews.
“Our job is to delight,” Marc Platt, the film’s lead producer, said to The New York Times after the premiere. “I’m hopeful that once audiences actually experience the film, all the noise around it will fade away and people will discover a family entertainment that is joyful, aspirational and delightful.”
Disney movie executives lined up an A-plus creative team. In the producer’s chair would be Platt, now a four-time Oscar nominee for Wicked, La La Land, Bridge of Spies and The Trial of the Chicago 7. Marc Webb, who had experience with big-budget blockbusters, including two Spider-Man movies, came aboard as director. Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, the EGOT-winning songwriting partners (Dear Evan Hansen, The Greatest Showman), would contribute new tunes.
Most important, screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson (The Girl on the Train) had collaborated with Pasek and Paul to modernise the story. Snow White, now named after a wintry storm, was no longer a naive princess defined by her looks; she was a leader in training, someone the Evil Queen despised because she was beautiful, yes, but also because she prized fairness as a leadership quality. The prince was dropped; that love interest became a Robin Hood-esque scofflaw. And the dwarfs, especially Dopey, were given character arcs of their own – more emotional depth, less bumbling physical comedy.
Greta Gerwig (Barbie) and five other writers did polishes. Satisfied by their work, Alan F. Horn, then chair of Walt Disney Studios, pushed the project forward with a budget of US$210 million ($367m). It was fall 2021. He retired from Disney shortly thereafter, entrusting execution to his former team.
From the beginning, Disney knew the seven dwarfs could become a public-relations nightmare. Disney fans delight in them. The dwarfism community, however, tends to view the characters as infantilising, dehumanising and hurtful.
The first real blowback came in January 2022 when actor Peter Dinklage (Game of Thrones) criticised Disney for remaking Snow White during an appearance on Marc Maron’s WTF podcast. “I was a little taken aback when they were proud to cast a Latina actress as Snow White,” Dinklage said. “You’re progressive in one way, and you’re still making that backwards story about seven dwarfs living in a cave? Have I done nothing to advance the cause from my soapbox?”
Disney swiftly put out a statement: “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.”
As the initial March 2024 release date moved back – Disney was underwhelmed by the first cut and ordered reshoots – the studio found itself playing Whac-a-Mole with one dwarf controversy after another. When it finally emerged that Disney had opted to use CGI to render Doc, Sleepy, Bashful and the gang, the company came under attack for the “erasure” of people with dwarfism.
Others criticised Disney for denying them jobs. “I was born to play Dopey,” Matt McCarthy, an actor with dwarfism, told reporters as he and his wife, an actress with dwarfism, planned a protest outside Disney headquarters in Burbank, California. “When you’re a little person, opportunities are few and far between,” he said.
On August 9, 2024, Disney’s marketing campaign for Snow White kicked into a higher gear with the release of a teaser trailer. It did not go well.
Some people criticised the dwarves. Others mocked Zegler’s wig, likening her helmet hair look to Lord Farquaad from Shrek. Many simply questioned the wisdom of remaking the 1937 original.
But the real headache came a few days later when Zegler shared the trailer on the social platform X and added, “And always remember, free Palestine.” In an instant, Snow White became part of a highly divisive global political conversation – the opposite of what Disney wanted. Zegler’s comment also caused a severe rift with Gadot, who is Israeli. (Both actors declined to comment for this article.)
The best containment strategy, Disney decided, was silence. But Platt flew to New York from Los Angeles to have a heart-to-heart with Zegler. He explained how much was at stake, both for Disney and for her career, and asked her to post heedfully.
In November, however, Zegler took to Instagram to sound off about the presidential election. In a post salted with expletives, she harshly criticised Trump and those who had voted for him.
This time, members of Zegler’s management team, including agents at Creative Artists Agency, sprang into action. Her post was quickly replaced with an apology. “I let my emotions get the best of me,” she said. “I’m sorry I contributed to the negative discourse.”
But it was too late. Zegler, Snow White and Disney had already been in the crosshairs of right-wing pundits. Now, it was open season.
Zegler’s fans rallied around her. “So overjoyed knowing that little Latinas will be able to see themselves as such an iconic Disney princess,” one commented on Zegler’s Instagram page.
As Snow White bounced from one controversy to the next, the Hollywood gossip mill kicked into high gear: Surely, Disney would cut its losses and send this beast straight to streaming.
But sweeping Snow White under the rug was never something that Disney considered.
Reviews arrived Wednesday. Critics praised Zegler’s performance but were underwhelmed by the film as a whole. “It’s just, well, fair,” Nell Minow wrote on RogerEbert.com.
Based on ticket presales and surveys of moviegoer interest, Snow White was expected to collect US$45m to US$50m at domestic theatres over opening weekend, according to box-office analysts. It ended up coming in lighter, making US$43m. That start is slow for a Disney live-action remake: In the 15 years that the company has been producing them, none of the big-budget entries have exclusively arrived in theatres to less than US$58m, after adjusting for inflation. (That was Dumbo in 2019.)
David A. Gross, a box office analyst, noted that some of the thrill of seeing an animated classic reimagined as a live-action spectacle has worn off in the years since Snow White went into production. The film’s ultimate box office tally will probably come down to what he called “the babysitter effect”.
“Never underestimate the need for a 6-year-old to be entertained,” Gross said.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Brooks Barnes
Photographs by: Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet
©2025 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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