Mirror, mirror, on the wall, how many more remakes until Disney falls?
Well, actually it looks like it shouldn’t take long because from the looks of it, this year does not seem promising for the company.
Disney has again decided to remake a classic animated film and turn it into a live action movie that no one asked for.
In this case it’s “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”, which will be released on March 21. The film, which was Disney’s first full-length animated featured when it came out in 1937, is renamed “Snow White”.
Even though the new film hasn’t even come out yet, it has already received a bunch of backlash and attracted controversy.
Starting back in 2022, Rachel Zegler, the actor portraying Snow White, and her co-stars went on a press tour to promote the movie by doing a bundle of interviews. In one interview with Variety, Zegler was asked if they were bringing a modern edge to the movie.
“It’s no longer 1937,” Zegler told Variety. “We absolutely wrote a Snow White where she’s not going to be saved by the prince and she’s not going to be dreaming about true love. She’s dreaming about becoming the leader she knows she can be.”
But what Zegler said faced a huge amount of backlash.
Multiple netizens in the comment section of the video thought that taking the aspect of love out of a love story defeated the whole purpose of the movie.
Furthermore, Zegler’s made comments during the interview that sparked criticism among fans.
“There is nothing wrong with dreaming about true love,” Zegler said. “Not every girl wants to be a leader”.
Plenty of girls want to find love. That’s perfectly healthy. Many people said that director Marc Webb and screenwriters Greta Gerwig and Erin Cressida Wilson should have just kept the original storyline.
After all, it’s a Disney classic.
Instead of people just hating what Zegler said, they started to hate on her as an actress.
Undeniably, the character of Snow White is portrayed as a girl with skin as white as snow. But many netizens started to fixate on Zegler being a person of color, focusing on her skin not being white like the original portrayal of the animated character.
With Zegler being Polish and Colombian multiple netizens are furious with this, saying that it’s taking the original aspect of the movie and shoving it down the drain.
But others think it’s a good way to support inclusivity and represent different peoples’ backgrounds in classic movies.
Other Disney movies have attracted controversy for similar reasons.
In the live action “Little Mermaid”, released back in 2023, people all over social media argued over Ariel being played by Halle Bailey, who is black.
Many people saw this as a positive change to the original animated movie, but Disney and the actress still faced a ton of negative comments.
The seven dwarfs are also receiving a bunch of controversy with how they are presented in the movie’s leaked photos back in 2023.
The photos show the “seven dwarfs” as normal sized people just wearing costumes and accessories to make themselves “look” like the seven dwarfs.
Fans criticized this because of the fact that the film cast only one person with dwarfism, which is a genetic mutation that affects bone growth.
People were infuriated because they thought that if the seven dwarfs were supposed to be presented as dwarfs then filmmakers should cast people with dwarfism.
This would display a sense of inclusion with people in a certain group in society, just like how filmmakers cast Zegler, a person of color.
But it seems that Webb and casting directors had enough of all this controversy and drama because in the final trailer it looks like those seven dwarf actors were cut and replaced with seven people made to look like dwarfs thanks to CGI.
This new portrayal seemed more unsettling and creepy because of the way the seven dwarfs are portrayed in the trailer.
Although Disney is good at turning animated films into live-action remakes, such as “The Jungle Book” and “Mulan”, it needs to realize that not every old film needs a live action remake.
From the looks of it, “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” seem to be a classic that should have been left alone.
In fact, this live action version of the film might be so bad that the Disney executives who greenlit this project will need to mine diamonds with the seven dwarfs to make up for all the money they’re about to lose.