On Friday, Disney announced that its live-action Snow White movie starring Rachel Zegler would be delayed by a year from March 22, 2024 until March 21, 2025. The movie, officially titled Disney’s Snow White, is considered one of the studio’s biggest offerings of the year and is regarded as one of the cornerstones of its spring slate, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
The film has been the focus of considerable controversy since it was announced. Peter Dinklage called Disney hypocritical for casting a Latina actress as Snow White while still telling a story with a “f—ing backwards” depiction of dwarfs.
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“There’s a lot of hypocrisy going on,” Dinklage said in the latest episode of Marc Maron’s WTF Podcast via Variety. “Literally no offense to anyone, but I was a little taken aback when they were very proud to cast a Latina actress as Snow White. But you’re still telling the story of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Take a step back and look at what you’re doing there. It makes no sense to me.”
The live-action remake of 1937’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs landed at the center of the culture wars as well. Initially, conservative critics questioned the casting of Latina star Rachel Zegler (West Side Story) as a character described in the Brothers Grimm story as having “skin as white as snow,” and they objected to transforming the seven dwarfs into a diverse array of magical creatures ranging in size and gender.
Then, a number of comments from last year resurfaced, with Zegler drawing attention by indicating she doesn’t like the original film and that the new film will treat the iconic character very differently.”She’s not going to be dreaming about true love,” Zegler told Variety in September. “She’s dreaming about becoming the leader she knows she can be and the leader that her late father told her that she could be if she was fearless, fair, brave, and true.”
The Telegraph then featured an August interview with David Hand, a Disney designer in the 1990s whose father directed the original film. While Hand doesn’t directly criticize Zegler, he heavily criticizes the film.
“It’s a whole different concept and I just totally disagree with it, and I know my dad and Walt would also very much disagree with it,” Hand said. He called Disney’s move a “disgrace,” saying they are “trying to do something new with something that was such a great success earlier. … Their thoughts are just so radical now. They change the stories, they change the thought process of the characters, … they’re making up new woke things and I’m just not into any of that. I find it quite frankly a bit insulting [what] they may have done with some of these classic films. … There’s no respect for what Disney did and what my dad did. … I think Walt and he would be turning in their graves.”
Although Hand is 91 years old, some young critics also oppose the reimagining of the film. In a TikTok video, a user amassed nearly 10 million views, arguing, “Criticizing Disney princesses is not feminist. Not every woman wants to be a leader. Not every woman wants or craves power and that’s OK. It’s not anti-feminist to want to fall in love, to want to get married, to want to stay home — none of these things make you less valuable.”
In the Disney canon, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs stands out as the first full-length animated film, and its success allowed the company to move forward with more films. Also starring in Snow White are Gal Gadot as the Evil Queen, Ansu Kabia as the Huntsman, and Martin Klebba as Grumpy
