Snow White, the classic Grimms’ fairy tale, is getting a new remake by Disney. The American media giant produced a film adaptation of it already, almost a hundred years ago, the acclaimed 1937 animated feature Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. The new instalment is coming out next year, with quite an ironic twist: Snow White, who is described as having ’skin as white as snow’ in the original Grimm Brothers version, is no longer white at all.
Instead, she will be played by actress Rachel Zegler, a Latina of Colombian ancestry. What’s more, she already managed to stir up quite a bit of controversy about an otherwise innocuous children’s tale. An interview she originally gave in September 2022 resurfaced and garnered a lot of criticism last month. In it, she says things such as ‘she [Snow White] is not gonna be saved by the Prince, and she’s not gonna be dreaming about true love, she’ll be dreaming about the leader she can be’.
Her remarks suggest that modern feminist theory will be injected into a classic European fairy tale, implying that women are still actually held down by men in society.
And the modern ‘woke’ ideology did not stop there with butchering a classic.
The traditional depiction of the seven dwarfs has been changed, as it has been deemed ‘ableist’. Instead, seven ‘magical creatures’ will be keeping Snow White company in the forest. Out of the seven, only one will have dwarfism, the other six will be a diverse group of all ethnicities and genders…My my.
This is not the first time Disney is switching the race of the main character of a classic European children’s story. They have actually done it once this year already. The Little Mermaid was originally written by Danish author Hans Christian Andersen in 1836, about a white, ginger-haired mermaid girl. The 2023 Disney remake stars African-American singer and actress Halle Bailey.
This is an interesting trend, given the fact that
‘cultural appropriation’ is something that the progressive woke ideology supposedly shuns.
This new term refers to the practice of one culture taking a custom, story, or other feature from another culture and incorporating it into its own. According to this, switching the race of a character should be strictly forbidden.
This is the very reason the Hungarian State Opera got into some trouble back in 2019. The opera house decided to stage a production of the 1935 American opera Porgy and Bess with an all-white cast, despite the original having nearly all black actors (with the exceptions of the white police officer characters). While this was not in the licencing contract, upon finding out about it, the play’s rightholders tried to get the Opera to denote on the promotional materials that the performance was ‘contrary to the requirements for the presentation of the work’, to no avail. The cultural appropriation scandal was covered by such major Western, left-leaning publications as The New York Times in the United States and The Guardian in the United Kingdom.
However,
it seems when it’s time to ‘appropriate’ European culture, the American megacorporation Disney is quite enthusiastic about it.
That is despite the fact that the audiences do not seem to be on board with their recent releases. The Disney news-specific website Disney Dining reports that box office losses for the company from the last year total over $2 billion. The losing streak kicked off with the June 2022 release of Lightyear, a spin-off of the successful Toys Story films, which ended up losing over $100 million for Disney. It too had some controversies over casting, as Tim Allen, one of the few openly conservative actors in Hollywood who was the original voice of the titular character Buzz Lightyear, was replaced by leftist activist and actor Chris Evans.
The series of box office flops continued for Disney with Strange World (2022), Indiana Jones and The Dial of Destiny (2023), and Haunted Mansion (2023).
The Little Mermaid, mentioned above, ended up grossing $570 million against a production budget of around $265 million. While it may seem like a major box office success for Disney, this is not so clear-cut. A certain percentage of the ticket sales revenue, usually half, is taken by the film theatres. Also, the production budget does not include the marketing costs, which is in the tens of millions of dollars at least for a major release of this size. The film industry news site Collider.com estimated that it needed to generate a revenue of around $560 million to break even—the film ended up crossing that threshold by ‘an inch’.
However, race swapping in a major production has also led to catastrophic results recently, although it was not a Disney production. The 2023 Netflix original Queen Cleopatra featured a black British actress named Adele James as Cleopatra, despite the historical figure being white with well-documented (and very much inbred) Greek ancestry. This angered a market unfamiliar with the new woke trends, Egyptians, who flooded the series with negative reviews on every platform. As a result, it became the lowest rated series on IMDB with a 1.1-star rating after 81,000 reviews.
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