What Hollywood Is Saying About Disney’s Snow White Crisis
“It’s almost like they’re running away from the movie,” says an executive at a rival studio.
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In a perfect storybook ending, Saturday’s premiere of the Disney live-action adaptation of Snow White would culminate in a familiar scrum on the red carpet in front of Hollywood’s El Capitan Theatre. Fans would scream and rubberneck. Entertainment reporters behind velvet ropes would ask frisky if innocuous questions of the movie’s stars, Rachel Zegler and Gal Gadot. A braying horde of photographers would envelop the actresses in a strobe of flashbulbs. And the Entertainment Industrial Complex would fire on all pistons en route to a robust opening weekend for the $270 million musical-fantasy — which prerelease “tracking” estimates currently predict will take around $53 million over Snow White’s domestic release March 21.
But like the fairy tale’s Evil Queen, Disney announced plans a few days ago to put business as usual on the red carpet into an eternal sleep. After a cascading series of controversies that have sniped at Snow White almost from the moment the project was announced in 2021, the House of Mouse is scaling back the movie’s premiere to just bare essentials. Barred from attending: dozens of media outlets from around the world typically enlisted to interview cast and creatives on the carpet. The sound bites and hundreds of thousands of social-media impressions typically generated by such stop-and-greet interactions: canceled before they can ever be uttered. Save, that is, for a few perfunctory remarks attendees Zegler and Gadot are expected to give to a Disney-sanctioned “house crew” predisposed against asking hard questions.
Taken on its own merit, a movie premiere is pretty much incapable of dictating a film’s box-office fate. But according to rival studio executives and film marketers canvassed by Vulture, certain premieres can provide tantalizing indications of what’s to come. Disney’s red-carpet restrictions — taken in conjunction with the studio’s unorthodox decision to begin preselling tickets to Snow White via online retailers like Fandango and Atom Tickets a mere 11 days before its release — paint a picture of a movie in crisis. Under normal circumstances, an event title with almost a century of household-name recognition and a $450 million price tag (when you include prints and advertising costs) would begin selling tickets at least a month in advance. “That’s data. The only reason why they would start presales that late is they are worried people would write about, Oh, man, the tickets are on sale and they’re not doing well,” an executive at another major studio says of Disney. “That and scrapping the red carpet tell me a story. It’s almost like they’re running away from the movie. And at this budget, that’s kind of crazy.”
Of course, few movies arrive onscreen with as much cultural Sturm und Drang as director Marc Webb’s megabudget contemporization of 1937’s epochal Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Its bibliography of outrage includes: anti-diversity outcry in 2021 that greeted the casting of mixed-race Latina actress Zegler as its titular heroine (whose skin is described as “white as snow” in the original animated film); Peter Dinklage lambasting the film’s perceived insensitivity toward little people — specifically, its “fucking backwards story about seven dwarfs living in a cave”; Zegler’s 2023 multi-interview characterization of the original Snow White as “extremely dated when it comes to the idea of women in roles of power” and “focus on a love story with a guy who literally stalks her” (she also noted, “People are making these jokes about ours being the PC Snow White, where it’s like, yeah, it is — because it needed that”); and seemingly conflicting views of the Israel-Hamas war by Zegler (who has described herself as “pro-Palestine”) and Gadot (who served in the Israeli Defense Forces and used her keynote speech at a recent Anti-Defamation League summit to denounce those not “condemning Hamas, but celebrating, justifying, and cheering on a massacre of Jews”).
Perhaps most problematic for Disney’s marketing apparatus, however, was then-23-year-old Zegler’s anguished reaction to President Trump’s election in November. “May Trump supporters and Trump voters and Trump himself never know peace,” she wrote in an Instagram post. “Fuck Donald Trump.” After supporters of the president responded on social media with postings such as, “Not taking my kids to see this trash after the statement you put out. @disney you need to do something about this” and “I hope you get no peace when this film BOMBS at the box office and streaming,” Zegler issued a hasty apology. But some rival studio executives ultimately feel the Mouse House made a tactical mistake in casting the outspoken Romeo + Juliet actress and failing to rein her in. “The reality is Rachel Zegler should not be playing Snow White,” one tells me.
Snow White makes theatrical landfall at something of a corporate inflection point for Disney. Last month’s Marvel Cinematic Universe entry Captain America: Brave New World has underperformed financially, becoming one of the long-running franchise’s lowest-earning titles. Also last month, Disney decided to move the theatrical release date for its Pixar animated sci-fi adventure Elio back one week — to June 20 from June 13 — so it would not compete head-on with the opening of Universal/DreamWorks’ live-action remake of How to Train Your Dragon. Industry insiders are, of course, parsing those happenings for meaning, recalling a time not so long ago when each new Marvel release went reliably and unquestioningly blockbuster and other studios moved off of money-minting juggernaut Pixar’s chosen drop dates — never vice versa. “Disney has been the indomitable studio that either won big or won huge,” our first executive says. “Now they’re not winning as much. Sometimes they have hits, sometimes they don’t. That’s how much their brand has suffered. They’re just like every other studio.”
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