A Closer Look At The “Snow White” Disaster

A new feature piece over at Variety has gone into the public relations mess surrounding Disney’s live-action “Snow White” which opened to a disastrous $43 million domestically and $87 million worldwide this past weekend.

As the trade effectively puts it, the film debuted to $34 million less than “Joker: Folie a Deux” despite costing over $70 million more to make. Critics reviews for the film have widely panned the work, though the film’s leading lady Rachel Zegler came off the best in said reviews, with her performance touted as the movie’s only saving grace.

Now it appears that Zegler could be saddled with a chunk of the blame going by the piece’s sources. They cite several social media postings of the actress and the fallout from those postings within the studio.

The disruption really began back at D23 with her comments about the original film being dated and touting the Prince as a ‘stalker’. One source says the studio should’ve stopped her then and there, but the trade says the Gina Carano “Mandalorian” lawsuit has made the studio “increasingly loath to weigh in on anyone’s speech”.

One key element was her post in August last year thanking her supporters on X for driving the film’s teaser to 120 million views in 24 hours. She added in the same thread: “and always remember, free palestine.” That addendum, mixing promotion of a tentpole film with a political statement, reportedly caused “shock” in the studio and the film’s producer Marc Platt spoke directly with her – but she stood by her post.

Around the same time, death threats toward Zegler’s co-star Gal Gadot spiked and Disney had to pay for additional security for her. An insider told the trade: “She [Zegler] didn’t understand the repercussions of her actions as far as what that meant for the film, for Gal, for anyone.”

When Zegler did a post slamming Donald Trump and his supporters after the presidential election, Disney reportedly had enough and soon Zegler began working with a Disney-sponsored “social media guru” to vet any posts before the film’s March 21st release.

On the flipside, Gadot has kept her comments on geopolitics limited and never mixed those messages with promotion of the film. One interesting revelation of the piece is that the supposed Zegler-Gadot feud was never really there.

Sources say the pair got along well during production and reshoots. It wasn’t until the past few weeks in the run-up to release that things got awkward, especially after they presented together at the Oscars with Zegler making a social media comment about Gadot that has been dubbed dismissive.

Disney then fueled the perception of a feud by scheduling the actresses for separate events during junketing.

The outlet cites plenty of other factors though that impacted the production – COVID-related production delay, a fire on set, actor’s strike impacting reshoots, and overall decline of Disney’s live-action movie adaptations.

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