The Walt Disney Company’s upcoming rendition of the classic Brothers Grimm tale Snow White has come across more obstacles than anyone could have imagined. A lot of it was self-inflicted harm—after all, in the name of ‘diversity’, they did make the ridiculous choice of casting a non-white, Latina actress to play a role known for having ‘skin as white as snow’…
What’s more, lead actress Rachel Zegler has done a lot of additional damage on her own to the film’s chances of making any profit at the box office. She has denounced the 1937 Disney classic animated version of the tale as ‘weird’ and insinuated it was sexist. However, the worst was yet to come from the actress.
After the 2024 US presidential election, won, as we are all aware, by Republican Donald Trump, she took to Instagram to share a deranged message with her followers. In it, she wrote: ‘May Trump supporters and Trump voters and Trump himself never know peace,’ and ended her message by simply writing ‘f*ck Trump’.
Needless to say, wishing ill publicly on half of your domestic consumer base is not a good marketing strategy. So, about a week later, Zegler did issue an apology to Trump supporters, but the damage was already done. Disney’s upcoming Snow White film already had little goodwill towards it among average American families, and the lead actress’ simple-minded political rant only added insult to injury.
This is evidenced by the reaction to Disney’s official trailer for the film as well.
After the teaser trailer’s release in August, Disney unveiled the official full-length trailer for the 2025 Snow White movie on 3 December. In the couple of days since it was uploaded, it has garnered 4.8 million views, but only 21,000 likes. The dislike count is no longer publicly visible on YouTube, however, a browser extension allows users to see an estimated dislike count based on its own collected data. According to that extension, it has around 200,000 dislikes.
'The film already had little goodwill towards it among average American families, and the lead actress’ political rant only added insult to injury'
Another telling sign of overwhelming public disapproval is that the trailer has more comments (27,000) than likes (21,000). And the comments with the most reaction are, as expected, not positive at all.
‘Wow. Disney. You truly are incredible. It took you 3 years, multiple rewrites, unnecessary CGI, and 209 million dollars just for me to enjoy a comment section of a movie I will never watch. Bless you,’ one YouTube user writes. ‘You should have created CGI for Snow White as well,’ writes another, referring to the fact that the production team added CGI dwarfs in post-production, after originally having a diverse group of ‘magical creatures’ in the cast in order to avoid offending people with dwarfism.
All those post-edits and pushed-back release dates are also racking up huge sums in the production budget as well. The $209 million mentioned by the YouTube comment above is just what’s on the film’s Google info panel. Variety Magazine estimates it at around $240 million, which means the movie will have to gross over $500 million just to break even. Film theatres usually take about half the ticket revenue, and marketing costs are not included in the production budget.
This is at a time when Disney would really need a major blockbuster success, after a series of costly flops such as Lightyear (2022), Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023), and Wish (2023).
You can watch the official trailer for Disney’s Snow White, in theatres from 21 March next year, below.
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