How did Snow White become the year’s most cursed movie?

Disney’s latest live-action adventure has been at the centre of various controversies over casting, alleged feuds and delays

March 21, 2025, The Guardian

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Once upon a time, Disney made a business decision: if it was going to adapt its library of animated movies into live-action features (with merch and theme park tie-ins galore), it should add Snow White to the pipeline. The 1937 classic – the company’s first full-length animated feature ever, its first crack at a veritable goldmine of princess IP – would follow the modernizations (and attendant revisions) of Cinderella and Beauty and the Beast, released in 2015 and 2017, respectively. It was only logical, Snow White being one of its most recognizable and brand-defining characters. The company began developing a live-action feature in 2016, in the heady first wave of its IP era.

Nine years later, Snow White has finally made it the big screen, but the journey has been anything but a fairytale. The remake has been a saga of delays, culture war flashpoints and controversies, some earned and much not. The new Snow White has managed the difficult feat of being a children’s movie that irritates both ends of the political spectrum at once, from rightwing nuts crying “woke” over the casting of Rachel Zegler, an American actor of Colombian descent, to pro-Palestinian advocates upset over the presence of the Israeli actor and IDF supporter Gal Gadot as the Evil Queen. And that’s not even getting to the obvious and nagging issue of the titular seven dwarves.

The title proved toxic enough that Disney took the rare step of scaling back its premiere six days ahead of its release, limiting the media presence to talent-friendly in-house press. (Though not without precedent – Warner Bros acted similarly with the 2023 rollout for The Flash, premiering in the midst of star Ezra Miller’s many scandals.) People have picked up on the fact that, well, the vibes are not good, with multiple reports that Disney is going through the motions to get it over and done with, stumbling to the finish line.

外刊精读261期：白雪公主真人版为什么口碑大扑街？(选自The Guardian卫报)

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