Why has Disney\u2019s new live-action remake of \u201cSnow White\u201d flopped at the box office? Is it because the dull trailer looked A.I.-generated, or because the film\u2019s stars, Rachel Zegler and Gal Gadot, appear to have sourced their costumes and makeup from Party City? Is it because the film personifies Hollywood\u2019s status as a bottle-and-can redemption center for moldering I.P.? Is it for being a movie nobody asked for, about a princess who falls asleep?<\/p>\n
The prospect of the \u201cSnow White\u201d reboot has been irritating various constituencies for some time. Conservative critics griped that Zegler, who is partly of Colombian descent, wasn\u2019t white (these kinds of complaints were louder a few years back, when the Black actress Halle Bailey was cast in Disney\u2019s live-action \u201cLittle Mermaid<\/a>\u201d). Some were offended that Zegler talked trash<\/a> about the 1937 original. The actor Peter Dinklage questioned<\/a> why the story was being dusted off at all. \u201cYou\u2019re progressive in one way,\u201d Dinklage said, referring to Zegler\u2019s casting, \u201cbut you\u2019re still making that fucking backward story about seven dwarves living in a cave\u2014what the fuck are you doing?\u201d<\/p>\n At some point, Disney started asking itself the same question. Despite the film\u2019s two-hundred-and-seventy-million-dollar budget, the studio scaled back the premi\u00e8re and promotional blitz and may have delayed making tickets available for pre-order. Currently, on IMDb, \u201cSnow White\u201d is being \u201creview-bombed,\u201d with more than ninety-one per cent of users giving it the lowest rating: one out of ten.<\/p>\n Recent articles in Hollywood\u2019s top industry broadsheets pin much of the blame on Zegler. The Hollywood Reporter observed<\/a> that the movie \u201chas been under fire for years on social media due to a combination of the film\u2019s progressive creative decisions\u201d\u2014presumably referring to Zegler\u2019s casting\u2014\u201cand star Rachel Zegler\u2019s controversial comments.\u201d In a Variety article<\/a>, which promised to take readers \u201cInside Disney\u2019s \u2018Snow White\u2019 Fiasco,\u201d a \u201ctop agent\u201d rebuked the studio for permitting the twenty-three-year-old actress to \u201ccontrol the narrative\u201d by making a lighthearted quip to a reporter about the stalker-like qualities of the original movie\u2019s Prince Florian. \u201cThe first time she shoots her mouth off, you nip it in the bud,\u201d this agent said. (Incidentally, the screenwriter of the new \u201cSnow White,\u201d Erin Cressida Wilson, has said<\/a> that she centered the character\u2019s journey toward \u201cdiscovering and trusting her own voice and her own purpose with compassion and strength.\u201d)<\/p>\n Variety also zoomed in on an episode from August, shortly after a teaser for the movie dropped, when Zegler shared a message of gratitude to fans on X, adding, in a separate post, \u201cand always remember, free palestine.\u201d The article implied that Zegler\u2019s post fuelled death threats against her co-star Gadot, who is Israeli. It also reported that one of the film\u2019s producers, Marc Platt, was so incensed by Zegler\u2019s pro-Palestine message that he flew to New York to admonish her in person about it.<\/p>\n The detail about Platt seemed to strain credulity, but it was later confirmed by his son Jonah, who wrote<\/a> on Instagram, \u201cYeah, my dad, the producer of enormous piece of Disney IP with hundreds of millions of dollars on the line, had to leave his family to to fly across the country to reprimand his 20 year old employee for dragging her personal politics into the middle of promoting the movie for which she signed a multi-million dollar contract to get paid and do publicity for. This is called adult responsibility and accountability. And her actions clearly hurt the film\u2019s box office.\u201d The younger Platt may have also been alluding to an Instagram post that Zegler made following the November elections, in which she lamented<\/a> the \u201cdeep, deep sickness in this country that is shown in the sheer amount of people who showed up for this man who threatens our democracy.\u201d She concluded, \u201cFuck Donald Trump.\u201d Zegler later apologized for her Trump-related remarks, saying, \u201cI let my emotions get the best of me.\u201d<\/p>\n Placing the failure of \u201cSnow White\u201d largely at Zegler\u2019s feet\u2014as many insiders in Hollywood are evidently eager to do\u2014is almost perversely flattering to her. The Walt Disney Company has a market cap of nearly a hundred and eighty billion dollars, and yet, in Variety\u2019s telling, this international conglomerate could not \u201covercome the backlash that had been brewing like a fairy tale cauldron.\u201d I am no box-office analyst, but, for what it\u2019s worth, my kids are squarely in the \u201cSnow White\u201d demographic, and I don\u2019t think they were lukewarm on going to see it because its star has insufficiently nuanced opinions about Prince Florian, President Trump, or the Israel-Hamas war. (An open letter<\/a> from film journalists criticizing Variety\u2019s coverage of Zegler has about a hundred and eighty signatures.)<\/p>\n The reasons behind the implosion of \u201cSnow White\u201d are structural and multifaceted, and emblematic of an industry that has no new concepts and poor judgment about which of its old ideas warrant revival. For example, Disney recently pulled the plug<\/a> on a streaming series based on \u201cThe Princess and the Frog,\u201d which is easily the best and most modern of the Disney-princess movies: glorious New Orleans blues-jazz-gospel soundtrack, outrageously stacked cast, makes an airtight case for marrying for money\u2014the works. (And no dwarves in caves!) Whether it\u2019s the fate of \u201cSnow White\u201d to become a symbol of the anti-woke, anti-D.E.I. fervor that characterizes the Trump II era or it\u2019s simply a casualty of reboot fatigue, the identity and political views of one performer could never have sunk the film on their own.<\/p>\n The Platt anecdote and the framing of the Variety article in which it first appeared point to what is perhaps the most interesting aspect of the \u201cSnow White\u201d debacle: the film\u2019s position in a larger narrative about which kinds of views on the Israel-Palestine conflict are acceptable in Hollywood\u2014or anywhere in the U.S. circa 2025, really\u2014and who is permitted to air them. The top Hollywood agent Maha Dakhil stepped away from her role as co-chief of C.A.A.\u2019s motion-pictures department after she shared\u2014and then deleted and profusely apologized<\/a> for\u2014an Instagram post that referred to Israel\u2019s military attack on Gaza as \u201cgenocide.\u201d The actress Melissa Barrera was fired<\/a> from the \u201cScream\u201d franchise for expressing<\/a> pro-Palestinian sentiments online. In contrast, the actor Mark Ruffalo won his fourth Oscar nomination in 2024 despite vocal opposition<\/a> on social media and elsewhere to Israel\u2019s military actions in Gaza. Ruffalo\u2019s fellow-actor Guy Pearce, one of the most prominent pro-Palestine voices<\/a> in the film world, earned his first Academy Award nomination this year and sat in the front row<\/a> at the ceremony, where \u201cNo Other Land<\/a>,\u201d about the I.D.F.\u2019s demolition<\/a> of a Palestinian community in the West Bank, won the Oscar for documentary feature.<\/p>\n In other words, there would appear to be space in Hollywood to demonstrate sympathy for the more than fifty thousand human beings that Israeli military forces have killed<\/a> in Gaza, as well as for the roughly twelve hundred human beings that Hamas killed in its October 7th terror attack on Israel. But you must be the right sort of person to demonstrate such sympathies, and you must use the correct terminology. One might speculate that Ruffalo and Pearce have more latitude than Dakhil and Barerra because they are both middle-aged white men. And yet, last year, after the director Jonathan Glazer won an Oscar for his astonishing Holocaust film, \u201cThe Zone of Interest,\u201d an open letter circulated in Hollywood to condemn his acceptance speech as supporting a \u201cblood libel,\u201d attracting more than a thousand signatories (Jonah Platt among them). One Academy member likened Glazer\u2019s measured words to a \u201cHamas rally.\u201d Among Glazer\u2019s offenses was in using the word \u201coccupation\u201d to refer to the occupied territories and invoking the \u201cdehumanization\u201d of both Israelis and Palestinians in the ongoing war.<\/p>\n The tenor of this conversation presumably informed a recent statement<\/a> issued by the C.E.O. and president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, after Hamdan Ballal, the Palestinian co-director of \u201cNo Other Land,\u201d was badly beaten<\/a> by Israeli settlers in his West Bank village and then detained<\/a> overnight on an Israeli military base, his whereabouts unknown to family and friends for hours. \u201cUnderstandably, we are often asked to speak on behalf of the Academy in response to social, political, and economic events,\u201d the AMPAS statement read in part. \u201cIn these instances, it is important to note that the Academy represents close to 11,000 global members with many unique viewpoints.\u201d The text did not mention Ballal by name, or enumerate any of the unique viewpoints one might have on his terrifying situation. (After an outcry by hundreds of Academy members, AMPAS issued an apology<\/a> for neglecting to name Ballal.)<\/p>\n The organization released its non-statement of non-support on behalf of a freshly minted Oscar winner on the same day that video emerged of a Tufts University student, Rumeysa Ozturk, being accosted<\/a> outside her apartment building by masked, plainclothes ICE agents; she was handcuffed, detained, and flown to a facility in Louisiana, reportedly for co-authoring an op-ed<\/a> in a student newspaper citing Israel\u2019s \u201cclear violations of international law\u201d in Gaza. Ozturk\u2019s arrest, which has sparked worldwide condemnation, was made possible by precisely the two conditions that Zegler\u2019s controversial posts acknowledged: the subjugation of Palestinians and the election of Donald Trump.<\/p>\n