Once upon a time there was a girl who liked to speak her mind. She liked it so much that she spoke and she spoke and she spoke until she finally spoke herself into an international uproar.
‘Mark my words, there’s trouble a-brewin,’ Grumpy once said. And he was right.
When Walt Disney Pictures cast Rachel Zegler as Snow White in its £215million live action remake of the original Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs cartoon, little did they know that she would turn out to be another problem on a troubled production that seems doomed to flop.
Working in Los Angeles, I went to see the film on a 70-foot XD screen at the Cinemark Playa Vista. There were six customers in the cavernous 450-seat auditorium. Two walked out after about 40 minutes, during the scene when Zegler’s glutinous Snow White is teaching Dopey how to whistle.
It wasn’t hard to understand why they couldn’t stand another second of torture. I also empathise with the online reviewer who posted: ‘If this film was being shown on a plane, I would still walk out.’
Little wonder. For a start, the Prince has been replaced by a drip called Jonathan (Andrew Burnap), who is a kind of Gary Lineker-lite-meets-Robin Hood character; the sort of man who’d get sympathy period pains and drink a craft beer on a first date.
‘You continue to impress me,’ he tells Snow White, hardly the language of love.
The humourless girl-power plot is laboured, the new songs are sub-Take That drear – and then there are the computer-generated dwarfs. From the moment they first trundle onscreen in their red onesies, the terror begins.
Walt Disney cast Rachel Zegler (pictured) as Snow White in its £215million live remake of the originalÂ
The new Snow White has been widely criticised since its release, even being branded ‘exhaustingly awful’
Jan Moir went to watch the film in a 450-seat auditorium with six customers – two walked out after 40 minutes
Their bulbous motion-capture features and squelchy bodies are the stuff of nightmares, for emphasising that they are non-human only takes away their humanity.
Disney was first criticised for having proposed to use actors with dwarfism in the iconic little people roles and then slammed for denying work to real-life dwarf actors.
‘I was born to play Dopey,’ one grumped recently, lamenting the lack of acting opportunities that came his way. Now a group of little people actors are planning to sue Disney for discrimination.
Which means the last thing that the film company and Snow White producer Marc Platt needed was further controversy.Â
Particularly from a starlet who likes to broadcast on social media about how much she hates Donald Trump, supports Palestine and thinks the original Snow White was an outdated exercise in misogyny. But that is exactly what they got.
It has become painfully clear that 23-year-old Zegler, although a talented performer and singer, is also a typical Gen Z know-all.
A young actress heady with the first flush of fame, she appears to be suffused with the kind of radiant moral superiority that makes her feel qualified to judge the past by the mores of the present.
In interviews to promote Snow White she managed to create a one-woman anti-buzz, talking of how she ‘hated’ the original, found it ‘scary’, only watched it once and was disappointed with the sexual politics and lack of feminist ambition on show.
‘Woke’ Snow White star Rachel Zegler (pictured) said her portrayal of the character ‘was not going to be saved by the Prince’Â
The actress, 23, who stars in the $215million remake of the 1937 classic has been beset by multiple controversies
‘The original cartoon came out in 1937 and very evidently so. There’s a big focus on Snow White’s love story with the guy who literally stalks her. Weird, weird!’ she said, guffawing with self-delight. ‘So we didn’t do that this time.’
Speaking alongside co-star Gal Gadot – the Israeli actress who took on the cape-swirling role of the Evil Queen – Zegler said her Snow White was ‘not going to be saved by the Prince’ and is not someone who’s ‘going to be dreaming about true love’.
It is so exhausting.
In the modern world of woke, every woman from Eve onwards has got to be a girlboss or a mumpreneur or a cross between Oprah Winfrey and Emmeline Pankhurst, or else they are considered worthless.
Yet if Zegler’s banal revisionism is bad enough, it is with her politics that she has perhaps done the most harm, potentially alienating half of those who might have otherwise gone to see her film.
After President Trump was re-elected last year, Zegler posted messages on her Instagram account that read ‘F*** Donald Trump’ and ‘May Trump supporters never know peace’.
In August, she thanked Snow White fans when a clip from the film was released. ‘Thank you for the love and for 120million views on our trailer in just 24 hours,’ she wrote ‘And always remember, free Palestine.’
Considering her co-star Gadot is a high-profile Israeli actress whose very involvement in the film had encouraged calls for a boycott from the usual nutter factions, wasn’t it a little insensitive?
In the modern world of woke, every woman from Eve onwards has got to be a girlboss or a mumpreneur or a cross between Oprah Winfrey and Emmeline Pankhurst, writes Jan Moir
To date, the new Snow White has grossed only $94.7million (£73.2million) globally, some way short of the $500million (£386million) which The Hollywood Reporter says it needs to reach its box office safety net
The film has been branded ‘calamitous’, but Jan Moir argues that Zegler ‘somehow’ manages to hold her own
Walt Disney Studios had expected Snow White to earn between $45M-$55M from 4,200 North American theaters and around $50M internationally in its opening weekend
That tweet led to a spike in death threats aimed at Gadot, prompting Disney to give her private security.Â
Producer Marc Platt was so concerned, he flew from Los Angeles to New York to speak to Zegler in person about her social media presence. She later apologised for her remarks in a carefully worded statement. ‘I let my emotions get the best of me,’ she said. But the damage was done.
This week Jonah Platt, the son of the film’s producer, fumed: ‘She hijacked the conversation for her own immature desires at the risk of all the colleagues who depend on that movie to be successful. Narcissism is not something to be coddled.’
Is Zegler really to blame for Snow White’s lacklustre box office performance? To date it has grossed only $94.7million (£73.2million) globally, some way short of the $500million (£386million) which The Hollywood Reporter says it needs to reach its box office safety net – but is that her fault?
Throughout a calamitous film, poor Zegler somehow manages to hold her own. She came to this mess fresh from her star turn as Maria in Steven Spielberg’s wonderful remake of West Side Story, so we all know she can act and sing.
But she is not given a song worthy of her talents.
Someday My Prince Will Come has been ditched – too needy – and replaced by the instantly forgettable Waiting On A Wish. Other woke tweaks include replacing th original reason for Snow White’s name – she had ‘skin as white as snow’ – by insisting it was because she was born in a snowstorm instead.
Some of the dwarfs look oddly familiar – Dopey is a deadringer for a post-Ozempic Wayne Rooney – but should I be offended that they all seem to be Celtic? One of them even seems to have a Scottish accent (as a Glaswegian might say, ‘No he Disney’).
Zegler and Gadot appeared tense together on stage at the Oscars earlier this month as they presented an award – but have not appeared as a duo on the press tour for Snow White
The pair pictured at the Los Angeles premiere alongside (left-right) producer Marc Platt and Mark Webb, songwriters Benj Pasek and Justin Paul and producer Jared LeBoff
And the dwarfs do not return to their cottage, as they did in the 1937 original, to discover that Snow White has cleaned up the place. Instead, they tidy with her.
She delegates the tasks like a Marie Kondo in a puffball skirt because God forbid any neanderthal should think that household chores are purely women’s work.
As annoying as she is, this is Disney’s disgrace not Rachel’s folly. By attempting to upset no one it has offended everyone.
She is young and silly and perhaps she will be a little more tactful in future. Her outspoken progressive politics are one thing, her trashing of the original film is unforgivable!
She fails to appreciate not just the past, but the sheer loveliness of the cartoon and the vivid imaginations behind one of the first ever full-length animated films.
It was revolutionary, it was brave, it was an astonishing masterpiece of storytelling. If they put that on at the Playa Vista instead of this dismal new version, people would be queuing around the block.
Instead, after this Snow White has finished, the remaining four of us shuffle outside the cinema having lived through the longest 109 minutes of our lives. Heigh ho.