Flasz On Film

Nobody of sound mind and spirit has ever thought that sifting through an airplane crash site would be an experience they’d embark upon with fervor and glee. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said about the act of analyzing what went wrong with a movie production and why certain movies become forever remembered as the most iconic box office disasters rather than culturally-relevant masterpieces. Therefore, I’d like to be perfectly clear here that even though nobody typically dies in the wake of a large-scale box office flop and the only things that do in fact take damage are wallets, egos and careers, I’m not going to derive any pleasure out of analyzing the wreckage left behind by the recently released live-action remake of Snow White.  

I can only expect that many Monday morning quarterbacks high on their I-told-you-so kale smoothies are now cackling outrageously with their heads thrown back, as though this production had it coming all along with its many missteps, fits and starts. Maybe it did, maybe it didn’t. It is, however, a fascinating case that probably deserves a few words to be spared about it—not necessarily in its defence—but at least to contextualize the financial and cultural outcome it is likely to receive in the coming weeks and months.  

It is important to remember that when Snow White was being considered for a live-action refresher, all signs were pointing to a likely success. After all, even though the concept of a live-action remake of a Walt Disney picture dated back as far as the 1994 Jungle Book and the 1996 101 Dalmatians, it was only in the wake of the 2008 financial crash when it generated serious traction. While studios were scrambling to save their bottom line by launching sequels to highly profitable franchises (Transformers and Fast & Furious, for example), building towards shared universes (MCU, DCEU and later Star Wars) and monetizing the budding concept of a nostalgia sequel, the Mouse House rolled out the Tim Burton-directed Alice in Wonderland, which earned a highly respectable billion dollars in box office receipts.  

It took a few more years for the trend to settle in, but with the release of Maleficent, Cinderella, Jon Favreau’s The Jungle Book and The Beauty and the Beast, the concept of live-remaking classic Disney properties proved sustainably profitable and incredibly successful despite the fact that each one of these massive productions carried a substantial financial risk with their exorbitant production budgets and marketing overhead costs. However, the returns north of a billion dollars for movies like Aladdin, The Lion King and the aforementioned The Jungle Book and The Beauty and the Beast most assuredly gave their financiers enough confidence to push the envelope even further and gamble with increasingly lavish productions. 

Now, I don’t know whether the trend itself was already past its apex at the turn of the current decade, as some of these remakes hadn’t been as profitable as others (Alice Through the Looking Glass and Dumbo had not receive a hero’s welcome and probably just about scraped together a profit, if at all) or if the arrival of the COVID pandemic threw a brick into the spinning drum of Disney’s money machine. It’ll be impossible to tell, but I can be reasonably sure that it didn’t help either and the reason why we’re here today is a confluence of factors ranging from the pandemic force majeure disrupting life as we knew it and the moviemaking business model having to re-engineer itself in response to downstream cultural shifts exacerbating political divisions and the simple fact that big corporations are not accustomed to the idea of thinking on their feet. Big studios are more likely to double down rather than change tack as it is a lower energy response in their view.

Therefore, Disney carried on undeterred when the production of Snow White and The Little Mermaid had to be postponed due to COVID lockdowns. They doubled down on their cultural messaging in response to pockets of vocal (yet likely minor in scale) backlash against the decision to cast Rachel Zegler in the titular role and Gal Gadot as the Evil Queen. They ploughed on when the filming was delayed due to fire on the production lot. And it took them a while to rethink their plan to replace the seven dwarves with gender- and ethnically-diverse “magical creatures,” an idea that looked progressive and inclusive from the outside while still relying on keeping the problematic original concept of seven pocket-sized miners living together in a house in the woods and taking care of a stray princess.  

I can understand the logic behind these many trials and tribulations, reshoots and rethinks because the upside of getting it right was producing a billion-plus dollars in box office receipts and that’s nothing to sniff at. Even the price tag of 250 million dollars (which is essentially indistinguishable from how much it cost to produce The Little Mermaid by the way) would pale into insignificance in the face of success this movie was banking on engineering. However, with ballooning budgets and matching marketing costs working to increase the cultural visibility of the movie (which only served to exacerbate the online backlash coming from the right-hand side of the Overton window), Snow White now needed to become a billion-dollar movie to be seen as remotely successful in the first place. Anything under a billion dollars in global box office take is likely going to still keep this production in the red. You gamble big, you need to win big.  

Sadly, I don’t think it’s possible and it’s not because of Rachel Zegler’s heritage or Gal Gadot’s political views. It is because (1) Snow White doesn’t seem to have the sway of something like Frozen or Moana, (2) the songs aren’t catchy enough and (3) because the story itself—even with increased Elsa-like agency Snow White enjoyed and the nicely inclusive colorblind casting—just doesn’t have the required oomph. And let’s just say that the last-minute U-turn on the dwarf front can clearly be interpreted as sloppy filmmaking because the CGI dwarves (both their rendering and compositing) look as though their animators didn’t get enough time to put in sufficient effort. They look so bad that Robert Zemeckis is likely to sue Disney for plagiarism.   

A movie that cost this much to make and suffered this many setbacks requires a good chunk of the world to come out and see it or at least to ensure repeat viewings from a smaller and more dedicated fanbase. But what are they going to come back to watch? The COVID experience has already primed general audiences to expect this movie to arrive on Disney Plus within the next few months (and as far as I am aware, Disney Plus only recently turned a profit as a streaming service so we can’t really expect this movie to become its financial force multiplier, now can we?) so they are unlikely to buy another ticket to go to the cinema and even if it wasn’t so, there’s not much to come back to here either. Snow White, while making alterations to the narrative and turning Snow White from a damsel in distress in need of a prince to come and save her into a youthful and rebellious leader, is still effectively the same story as the original 1937 Disney vision with the same aesthetic, the same beats and the same cultural motifs embedded within. From the mirror on the wall and conscious fauna to the poisoned apple and dwarf shenanigans, Snow White peddles the same goods as the old animated movie… which you can watch on Disney Plus and which young viewers are more likely going to revert to because the parents who had taken them to the cinema in the first place will not see the value in coming back for another round of live-action Snow-Whiting. However, the same young viewers are even more likely to scroll past Snow White anyway and instead choose to watch anything else they have at their disposal.

Sadly, the 2025 Snow White is a billion-dollar disaster waiting to happen and only a miracle of word-of-mouth marketing can save its sorry buttocks. Sure, a young girl will still derive some value from the experience and maybe learn a thing or two about creative differences and misalignments between renditions of the same archetypal narrative, but this movie just doesn’t have the oomph and the staying power to remain in our collective cultural consciousness for longer than it takes to leave the cinema. It is not because of its colorblindness, dwarf-related controversies, or other instances of what right-wing media see as pushing “the message” onto the captive public and indoctrinating young minds with “the woke mind virus” or something. It is because Snow White doesn’t have enough of a personality to convince young viewers who grew up watching Frozen that they should adopt this movie as a new cultural phenomenon. Well, that and the fact that Gal Gadot should be contractually forbidden from singing in movies. Shivers.   

I suppose that movies like Snow White and The Little Mermaid, which met a similar fate in the recent past, are here to remind us that while history doesn’t repeat as much as it rhymes, there are lessons we should have learned from it nonetheless. It is a well-documented fact that Hollywood studios are slow to respond to the changing times and when the culture shifts its direction to avoid a confrontation with the brick wall of obscurity there will always be some who respond too slow to avoid disaster. The 1967 Doctor Dolittle was a lavish and unseasonably expensive musical that gambled on the recent popularity of The Sound of Music and became one of the biggest car crashes in the history of Hollywood because the audiences changed, and musicals were no longer in vogue. Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate put an end to The New Hollywood. The Hindenburg was one of the last of the expensive disaster movies. Although I am not sure if Snow White will become the nail in the coffin of the live-action remake trend at the House of Mouse (especially because Mufasa: The Lion King has been a recent hit), but it might force some people in the position of influence to rethink their strategies and think twice about which of their properties viewers care about the most. If you were to ask me, and nobody did, I’d expect a live-action remake of Frozen to become the juggernaut Snow White needed to be. And I’m pretty sure my daughter would love to go and see that even as a too-cool-for-school teenager she is likely to be by the time Disney folks tap into this opportunity.