What Did Y’All Expect? It’s Called Snow WHITE.

Look, I’m all for people having the desire to express their opinions on subjects they feel passionately about.  Both stars have deep roots and personal skin in these games.  On their own time and watch they are free to think what they choose.  But when you’re cast as leads in a crucial movie for Disney–an iconic FAIRY tale–you are immediately being cast into the role of employee and evangelist.  You’re close enough to the folks who make decisions to have access to hard data that conclusively shows the demography of who makes up Disney’s core audience for an 88-year-old IP.  Of who is more likely to drop hundreds of dollats in a central Florida theme park on merchandise and a revisiting to Snow White’s castle.  The inconveinent truth is that that audience is disproportionately white, upscale and traditional.  And in this polarized landscape, observations about a president that far too many folks in that demographic somehow believe is the modern day Cyrus are just not necessary.

In fairness, this is a project that arose during an era where Disney creatives appeared hell-bent on force-feeding diversity into their IP.  We know where both the mood of the company and the country have gone since then.  If you’ve spent any time in an executive suite, you’d know these are hard choices and it’s far less personal than you might want to believe.  But even before the current administration and enabling took place, this was a movie that was having issues, as Wikipedia reminds:

The teaser trailer for Snow White was released on YouTube in August 2024 and became the most disliked teaser for a film trailer on the platform, garnering an estimated nearly one million dislikes and over 82,000 likes within three weeks, according to available data from browser extensions that display an approximation of YouTube dislikes.^[64][65]

The first full trailer for the film debuted at D23 Brazil in November 2024 and was attached to select theatrical screenings of Universal Pictures‘s Wicked before eventually being released onto YouTube on December 3, 2024.^[66][67] Stuart Heritage of The Guardian criticized the visual effects for the animals and dwarves. He said the dwarves “look like someone has snuck into Disneyland, grabbed the statues from Snow White’s Enchanted Wish and wrapped them in human flesh, as a serial killer would with a gift for their mother” and “like someone has shaved the Sonic the Hedgehog from that first Sonic the Hedgehog trailer that everyone hated.”^[68]Polygon‘s Petrana Radulovic wrote, “The new Snow White looks like it’s putting in more of a plot, likely one where our plucky heroine will stand up to her despotic tyrant of a stepmother in a YA dystopian plotline out of 2014. Maybe it’ll work, storywise! Visually, though, everything seems like it’s working on the same budget as ABC Family‘s [sic]^[69]Once Upon a Time.”^[70]

Shame on Radulovic for not knowing that that poorly rated and executed attempt to turn SNOW WHITE into a way to attract CW audiences actually aired on ABC; its second window was on its cable sibling.  With attention to detail like that from that generation, it’s not hard to understand why Zegler can’t grasp why her opinions on Palestine, let alone execution are absolutely unnecessary, forget unwelcomed.

There have been and will be more appropriate times for Zegler to channel her inner AOC.  When she was cast as Rita Moreno’s successor as Maria in the remake of WEST SIDE STORY in 2021–with Moreno’s endorsement amidst her presence as the candy store owner in Steven Spielberg’s iteration–she could have easily taken the opportunity to champion Latina women getting strong roles.  Heck, that’s the premise.  She played Juliet in the Broadway revival of ROMEO AND JULIET last year.  What a great opportunity it would have been for her to speak out on being able to be cast in the lead for the IP that inspired WEST SIDE STORY’s interracial version in the first place.  This summer she will be debuting in London’s West End as the title character in Evita.  If she wants to offer her thoughts on an authoritarian lader, there’d be no more apropos time for her to opine on Javier Milei than as she portrays another iconic Argentinian leader.

But, heck, Rach, read the damn room.  This is a movie that’s even pissed off the folks closest to its roots, as GAME RANT’sCatherine Armecin Martin noted yesterday:

Due to Gadot and Zegler’s opposing stance on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, rumors flew about on-set discord. However, David Hale Hand, the son of Disney animator David Hand, was more concerned about how the upcoming film will alter the original’s story.  In an interview with Page Six, the 93-year-old Hand, said he had no plans to watch the Snow White movie as he is upset with apparent changes made to the film. His dad served as the supervising director for Bambi and the original Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. “The original was the way it should be. From what I’ve read, [the new film] bears no reflection to the original story,” Hand said. “It’s so far off base that it’s ridiculous.” Even though he hasn’t seen the film, he added that the supposed changes made to it are enough to make his father and Walt Disney “roll in their graves.”

And PEOPLE’s Nicholas Rice threw another log onto the controversy fire:

Elsewhere, Snow White has been called out by Peter Dinklage, who was born with a form of dwarfism called achondroplasia. He accused Disney of “hypocrisy,” citing the fairy tale’s “backwards story about seven dwarfs living in a cave together.” (Disney opted to use CGI to bring the characters to life.). nSpeaking about the concerns with using real people to portray the seven dwarfs, Klebba told THR, “I don’t usually get into the political stuff, but I [felt], ‘Dwarfs aren’t going to go away just because you can’t imagine that they’re there.’ We’re still going to be walking around.”

Zegler may believe she has generational entitlement to offer her take to a world of what she likely sees as antithetical old farts.  It would be too simple to call her “woke”, and I suspect she’d resent such classification.  But she should be smart enough to know what Disney thinks of the term.  I worked on a Hulu series with that name; an all-but-forgotten 16 episodes of San Francisco-based “comedy” that featured FARGO’s Lamorne Morris in the lead.  It was released in the teeth of the pandemic, grudgingly renewed in the wake of a relentless pitch from then-supportive Sony TV management, and then proceeded to be a complete afterthought in season two and one of the first casualties of the new Sony regime that took root at that point, essentially joining Hulu in indifference.  You’d have to go deep in the weeds to find it on Hulu, and honestly, I can’t say it would be worth your effort.

So hey, if you realized that, not to mention possibly clicked on a website in recent months to see how the relationship between Disney and its uberfans is being impacted by everything else, maybe, just maybe, you might want to not bite the hand that feeds you?

Zegler is indeed a talent, but at this point being a political lightning rod and potentially a significant reason why people may not want to show up won’t bode well for her doing much more than theatre and independent films for a good while.   That may be personal, but it’s also business.

Someday, if not her prince, Zegler’s enlightenment will come.