Snow White and the Blame Game
- Sam Stashower
- 7 hours ago
- 9 min read
On March 21, 2025, Disney’s live-action remake of Snow White was released in theaters. Beset by controversy and bad press, the film ended up having an expectedly tepid performance at the box office. The causes of said controversies were manifold: racist backlash against the lead actor and the latest round of the seemingly never-ending cycle of men in their 40s getting mad at children’s media for having non-white performers on screen; a conversation about how dwarfism is portrayed on screen, and the seemingly irrevocable politics of the stars—one of whom has advocated for progressive causes and spoken out against genocide, and the other a former IDF soldier.
But according to Disney executives, the source of all the film’s woes could be placed at the feet of one person and one person only: Rachel Zegler, who tweeted her support for Palestine.
The choice to posit Zegler as the source of all the film’s problems is a strange one, especially when one watches the film, where she’s far and away the best thing about it. As a movie, 2025’s Snow White is far from the worst of the live-action Disney offerings: I’d say it’s about on the level of The Little Mermaid remake, in the sense that as a movie, it’s bad, but it at the very least boasts a very good lead performance (Halle Bailey shines in The Little Mermaid remake, which is especially impressive given how chronically underlit that movie was).
The attempts to expand on the original movie occasionally make sense—for example, their overt inclusion of the Evil Queen seducing and then having Snow White’s father murdered as a plot point, something that was barely subtext in the original. But more often than not, the changes are just confusing and speak to a tumultuous behind-the-scenes production environment. There are not one but two motley bands of outcasts that Snow White runs into to help on her journey: the dwarves, of course, but also a marauding band of outcasts who are affiliated with Jonathan (this film’s version of The Prince, now reimagined as a Robin Hood figure).
It’s not clear why both had to be in there. On a recent bonus episode of the Going Rogue podcast, media critic Tansy Gardam theorized that the marauding thieves were originally this film’s replacement for the Seven Dwarves, but that Disney stepped in and stipulated that the Dwarves had to be included because they’re such an iconic element of the original film.
This has created a situation where the marauders, despite being more central to the new story the remake is going for, have been left with almost no screentime or characterization at all, while the CGI Dwarves are essentially stuck replaying the hits from the 30s original. They’re there because the Snow White brand stipulates they be there, and they’re too integral to the iconography to be removed. Yet, given the general horror with which the public reacted to their uncanny valley renderings, it’s hard not to think they might have been better off not bothering.
If we’re talking positives, it really does just come down to Zegler. I suppose the film doesn’t always look horrible: other than the terrifying CGI flesh-golem renderings of the Dwarves, the visual style of the film is… I mean, it’s not great, but it is visible almost all the time. This at least puts it above The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast, which frequently had cinematography too dark to make anything out.
But it really cannot be overstated how much Zegler carries this project; even in a movie that overall feels as bland and soulless as all Disney™ products do these days, she carries herself with the energy of an authentic theater kid. Her performance speaks as someone who belongs in an actual live-action Disney movie, like Amy Adams in Enchanted, who so perfectly captured the spirit of a Disney princess transposed to the real world. Of course, Adams had the benefit of Susan Sarandon playing opposite her as a perfect Disney villain, whereas Zegler has… Gal Gadot.
As has been widely critiqued, Gadot’s awful in this. Honestly, the problem has less to do with her acting (although that’s obviously still a big part of it) and more to do with the fact that this new take on the character has been misconceived from the outset. The original animated Evil Queen was a blend of statuesque stillness and campy grandeur, while the remake has done away with the former and highlighted only the character’s camp qualities.
This is already a somewhat dubious proportion, but it becomes even more disastrous because Gal Gadot simply isn’t a camp performer. I’ve been enjoying the fancams of her questionable line readings as much as the next person, but I will say that there are some contexts in which her presence in a movie works—I quite like her in the Fast & Furious series—but this is a role that plays to absolutely none of her strengths.
No matter which way you slice it, Zegler’s the only one coming out of this project looking good. And yet, in the weeks immediately following the film’s release, there has been a concentrated effort to make it seem otherwise by Disney executives, all being reported anonymously by Disney-owned or Disney-friendly media outlets. They’ve attempted to pin all the blame for the disappointing reception and box-office underperformance on the social media presence of the main star.
The most fervent voice leading the charge has been leading industry publication Variety, which on March 25th published “Inside Disney’s ‘Snow White’ Fiasco: Death Threats, Beefed-Up Security and a Social Media Guru for Rachel Zegler.”
Naturally, it didn’t take long for the denizens of social media to start viciously poking holes in the article, which takes great pains to highlight death threats received by Gal Gadot, who eventually had to beef up security. Such actions are unconscionable, but it doesn’t take MCUmuch stretching to see the double standard at play here: Gadot is highlighted, while the constant harassment and racist vitriol faced by Zegler goes unmentioned. The fact that she had to move because people kept showing up at her home to scream profanities at her is also nowhere in the article.
This is hardly a first for Disney either. When John Boyega and Kelly Marie Tran faced insurmountable racist backlash for merely appearing in the Star Wars Sequels, Disney’s silence was deafening. In another instance, when it looked like the MCU’s The Marvels was going to flop, Disney hung director Nia DaCosta out to dry, with Variety running an article claiming that she had left the film in post-production. This is, in fact, a perfectly normal thing for directors working on multiple projects to do, but Variety still chose to frame it deliberately as her “abandoning” the project.
Incidentally, the person who started that rumor about DaCosta, Variety writer Tatiana Siegel, is the same person who penned the hit piece against Zegler. Highlights from her career include writing a similar attack against Melissa Barrera for her similar pro-Palestinian posts, as well as publishing Amber Heard’s private therapy notes. The motivation here is clear: the industry is sending a clear message about what it will do to stars who don’t toe the line (compare with Gal Gadot, who was able to give a lengthy speech in support of Israel with nary a hint of being “too political” from the higher-ups).
With Zegler, Disney’s scapegoating was much more overt than it had been in the past. In the article, they openly placed the lion’s share of blame on Zegler for posting “Free Palestine” and “Fuck Donald Trump”—two highly popular positions that resonate strongly with many Americans—to her social media accounts. They also put a lot of weight on how this prompted movie producer Marc Platt (Dear Evan Hansen’s dad) to fly out to New York to berate her into deleting the posts, seemingly under the assumption that once the posts were gone, everyone would forget they ever saw them.
It’s worth noting that this information was released with the clear intention to paint a picture: Zegler as a haughty, uptight starlet, causing problems for the put-upon movie producers and moguls who have to deal with her. This impression was only compounded with the additional comments of Jonah Platt (Dear Evan Hansen’s brother), who took to Instagram to pen a lengthy post attacking Zegler. This, of course, did nothing for the cause except give off the impression that a family of mostly grown adults still gets really scared whenever their patriarch has to leave unexpectedly for any length of time.
It’s plainly obvious that Disney is covering their asses. It wouldn’t be beneficial for them to admit the much more plausible reason for Snow White’s underperformance—people are just sick of these movies. For 10 years, ever since Kenneth Branagh foisted his “updated” Cinderella on us, Disney’s live-action remakes have been a blight on the moviegoing landscape, and they’ve only gotten worse with time.
All of these movies exist at an uncomfortable nexus between trying to acknowledge the evolved cultural understanding towards gender roles in society, while still fulfilling their obligations as marketable Disney fairy tales, a brand whose core identity is built around stories that could be described as retrograde. This extends to other Disney properties as well—the Star Wars sequel trilogy made a big show of casting predominantly women and non-white actors in the leading roles, but beyond the surface-level casting, very little in those new movies commented on or undercut the power fantasies that had been inherent to the Star Wars brand since the first movie.
Disney wants to have it both ways: they expect plaudits for making very basic, surface-level gestures towards inclusivity and progressivism, but they also want that to be where it stops. This leaves the movies in an awkward middle-ground between adherence to the past and acknowledgement of the future, and none of them have succeeded—probably my favourite own goal of recent years was when, in trying to make the main character seem even more important and powerful, the remake of Mulan turned the titular character from someone who had to get by on skill and tenacity alone into someone who succeeds because they have Force-like powers—and as mentioned, Snow White probably counts as one of the better ones.
It’s still nowhere close to good—the dwarves are pure nightmare fuel, and one-half of the lead duo simply cannot act. But the fact that it’s headlined by a star of genuinely luminous quality at least takes it to the standards of The Little Mermaid remake, another terrible film almost single-handedly made watchable because Halle Bailey is just that good. And it’s worth noting—it’s backfiring. Zegler is still being beset by middle-aged incels and their AI-generated YouTube thumbnails, but in other circles, she’s being hailed as an icon.
As Jeff Zhang said on Twitter, “It defeats the whole purpose of a hit piece if you're going to make your target look cool as hell.” There’s been a real miscalculation on Disney’s part in their failure to appreciate how appealing it is when a young star sticks to their principles in the face of overwhelming opposition—ironically, a central theme of the new Snow White. And there is a silver lining to all this; just recently, it was announced that Disney were halting production on their planned live-action remake of Tangled.
It would be a stretch to pin all the weight of that decision on Snow White—I imagine they also didn’t want to make a film so heavily associated with Zachary Levi, who has spent the last several months publicly aligning himself with Donald Trump. But if Rachel Zegler is even partially responsible for ending the plague of live-action remakes, honestly, give her a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame right now. I know an actress who could be pasted over.
Edited by Anish Paranjape
Sam Stashower is a recent graduate student and a writer at Political Pandora. He has contributed film reviews and pop culture analysis to The Quindecim (Goucher College) and The Eagle (American University). A devoted media enthusiast, he can—and inevitably will—find a way to connect everything he watches, listens to, or reads back to Star Trek.
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References:
Siegel, Tatiana. Inside Disney’s ‘Snow White’ Fiasco: Death Threats, Beefed-Up Security and a Social Media Guru for Rachel Zegler. Variety, 2025.
Siegel, Tatiana. Spyglass Says Melissa Barrera Was Fired From ‘Scream’ Due to Rhetoric That ‘Flagrantly Crosses the Line Into Hate Speech’ (EXCLUSIVE). Variety, 2023.
Siegel, Tatiana. 'Aquaman 2' Flooded With Drama: Jason Momoa Allegedly Drunk on Set, Amber Heard Scenes Cut, Elon Musk's Letter to WB and More. Variety, 2023.
Siegel, Tatiana. Crisis at Marvel: Jonathan Majors Back-Up Plans, 'The Marvels' Reshoots, Reviving Original Avengers ® and More Issues Revealed. Variety, 2023.
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