Disney’s Snow White Came Out. Here’s What the Audience Thinks. – The American Spectator | USA News and PoliticsThe American Spectator

Hollywood tends to think it’s on the cutting edge of the culture. 

That was probably true 100 or even 50 years ago, but it hasn’t been true for a good long while. At this point, it’s probably safe to say that Hollywood is well behind the culture, and Disney’s release of its live action Snow White over the past weekend is the perfect example. (You could say that Hollywood is hopelessly liberal and needs to be destroyed and restarted from scratch. That argument fails to account for market demand. Eventually, capitalism wins.) 

In its opening weekend, the film made $48 million at the American box office — a number that even CNN called “sleepy” (the film cost around $270 million to make). That said, Disney executives can take some heart; at least it beat out Captain America: A Brave New World, although it’s not hard to beat out a Captain America movie without Chris Evans. But back to Snow White. (READ MORE: Disney’s Snow White Is Well on Its Way to Disaster at the Box Office)

Liberal film critics couldn’t even bring themselves to like the film. The Guardian wrote that the film “is a bamboo-splinters-under-the-fingernails viewing experience … it has the look of an AI-created migraine … A film made by people with cartoon dollar signs for eyes and not the tiniest glimmer of art in their souls.” The New Yorker called out Gal Gadot’s performance in the film (casting, it turns out, actually matters), and the Times’ chief film critic proclaimed, “It represents a new low for cultural desecration and for a venerable 102-year-old entertainment company that now looks at its source material with a pinched nose of disgust.” 

It turns out that, if you commit enough faux pas and the ensuing film is actively hideous, even the liberal media can’t stomach it. Top critics at Rotten Tomatoes gave the film a dismal 29 percent positive rating, and while verified audience ratings came in significantly higher (at 74 percent positive), it hasn’t been even nearly enough to prevent the film from doing what we all knew it would do: bombing. 

Let’s review a couple of those faux pas. 

Snow White Was a PR Nightmare. Disney Has Itself to Blame.

Rachel Zegler is hardly the first person you would think of when looking at the cast of Hollywood figures and trying to identify who would fit the role best. She doesn’t exactly meet the physical criteria — unless you recently got out of a class on DEI at Disney’s headquarters. Then there were the dwarfs. In trying not to offend actual people with dwarfism, Disney opted for CGI dwarves and managed to offend every single short-statured person around. 

Then Zegler gave a couple of interviews that were meant to hype the film up, including a now infamous one with Vanity Fair, in which she managed to trash talk the beloved 85-year-old cartoon. Modern sensibilities being what they are, she assured her audience, this would be a PC version. (WATCH: The Spectacle Ep. 207: Here’s Why Disney’s Snow White Failed)

As if that weren’t enough, it turns out that Zegler is a hardcore pro-Palestine activist, while Gal Gadot has been actively working to make known the plight of Israeli victims of Hamas’ terrorism. The whole thing embroiled Disney in a heated controversy it certainly didn’t need. 

Then the film came out, audiences watched it, and it turns out that, for anyone with a sort of critical eye for detail, the film itself just wasn’t well done. Woke, after all, rarely begets actual art.

‘They Made Snow White an Activist.’

One audience member remarked in a review on IMDB (where the movie has a dismal 1.7 rating out of 10) that “I went into this with an open mind, but in spite of my best efforts, I could not enjoy this ‘film’. It was so sad to see such an amazing animated film ruined by such a poor attempt of modernization.” Another wrote, “Disney’s Snow White remake is a frustrating, woke adaptation that completely misses the magic of the original. “

Meanwhile, reviews on Rotten Tomatoes are more positive but still lackluster. The audience widely agreed that the film had way too many musical moments, and that its plot moved slowly and felt forced. “They made Snow White an activist,” one audience member remarked. “This story is supposed to be light hearted and fun. It was neither.” 

There’s a few lessons Disney’s executives — who were probably dreading this film’s release — should take from the Snow White bomb. The first is simply that American society as a whole is no longer interested in diversity initiatives and woke film messaging. We are, whether they like it or not, at the beginning of a new era in American culture. While some barely watched political commentators might complain about a Snow White who actually looks the part, most of us would be happier for it. 

Second, if you’re going to do a remake, you have to respect and honor the original story. Cinderella, one of Disney’s earliest remakes, was a complete success. The film was tasteful, respectful, and beautifully done precisely because the people who worked on it fell in love with the story. It’s obvious that, as Disney approached its Snow White remake, the goal was to redo a story Disney felt was a blemish on its past. It turns out that there’s a reason the original story is so timeless. 

Whether Hollywood and Disney like it or not, American society and culture are going in a vastly different direction than they were 10 years ago. If our entertainment industry wants to stay in business, it’s going to have to fall into line.

READ MORE:

As Hollywoke Crumbles