Snow White

Disney has released plenty of unpopular movies in the past, but their latest film, Snow White, may be their most egregious example yet. These live-action remakes of their classic animated library have been rightfully criticized for lazily banking on nostalgia, but this 2025 release had no one running to its defense, and it wasn’t just because of its quality. The movie was seeped in so much controversy that it was talked about more than the film itself, like the casting of Rachel Zegler as the titular princess, the conflicting stances both she and co-star Gal Gadot had over the ongoing Israel-Palestine war, and the horrendous CGI dwarfs which the internet wasted no time to start mocking. It was set to be Disney’s latest embarrassment, and it’s safe to say it fulfilled its destiny.

In a kingdom run by a benevolent king and queen, their daughter, Snow White (played by Rachel Zegler) loses her mother to a sudden illness and her father hastily marries a new queen (played by Gal Gadot), who quickly takes command of the kingdom after the king suddenly vanishes, reducing Snow White to nothing more than a housemaid. Wishing to bring joy back to her home but lacking the power to do so, Snow White is forced to leave the castle after the Queen tries to have her killed, fleeing into the surrounding forest where she comes across a cottage housing seven dwarfs named Doc, Grumpy, Bashful, Sleepy, Sneezy, Happy and Dopey (voiced by Jeremy Swift, Martin Klebba, Tituss Burgess, Andy Grotelueschen, Jason Kravits, George Salazar and Andrew Barth Feldman) who allow her to stay with them while she hides from the Queen. After coming across a group of bandits led by a rebel named Jonathan (played by Andrew Burnap), Snow White is forced to gain the courage to fight against the Queen and take back her home, even though the Queen has plans to silence Snow White forever through the use of a poisoned apple.

With a pretty bad rotten tomato critical score, a 1.5 rating on IMDB, and a meagre box office opening that has little chance of indulging the film’s astronomical budget of $240 – 270 million, the world has taken its stance on Snow White and are throwing vehement hate at it from every angle. While these remakes have long deserved this kind of disregard, it’s frustrating that the movie that is taking the brunt of all this hatred, isn’t the most deserving of it. It’s still a bad movie suffering with a flimsy story, bland characters, clumsy script writing, and questionable effects, but isn’t to the level of atrocious the reactions would have you believe.

This remake was arguably under more pressure than others of its type since Snow White was the pioneer for not just Disney as a cinematic behemoth, but animated films in general, so there’s a level of holiness attached to the original 1937 picture and therefore, a need from Disney to not embarrass their grandmother feature. It’s also tricky to imagine the right way to go about remaking this story, as the animated film already changed a lot from the 1812 Brothers Grimm fairy tale while keeping the essentials to make it flow correctly, so there isn’t a lot of room for readaptation outside of just changing things from scratch. A lot of these live-action remakes were very comfortable changing as little as possible in order to lure in nostalgia-hungry viewers, but this resulted in soulless retreads of beloved stories, so it’s hard to see how anyone wins in this situation. Snow White, to its credit, does go out of its way to readjust the story and try and tell its own narrative while keeping the necessities, but even this direction isn’t fool proof. While distinct from its animated counterpart, the changes aren’t fleshed out enough to properly take advantage of what they can provide, and the time dedicated to these new elements leaves the iconic sequences and visuals from the story feeling like afterthoughts that get brushed aside without much care.

This film’s biggest weakness is that the script written by Erin Cressida Wilson, is not very good at retaining the simple magic of the original fairy tale or exploring the new ideas brought forth. There are some decent scenes present that feel like they could work within an updated version of Snow White, but the dialogue is rarely interesting, a lot of the characters have good starts but aren’t fleshed out enough to be distinct, the flow of the story is pretty jumpy and can lead to a few pacing issues, and the film’s opening and ending are genuinely irritating to get through. The middle portion of the film is more tolerable, but there is a forgettable ambivalence felt throughout that makes it fairly easy to forget (when you aren’t getting horrified by the disgusting looking dwarves). This could be due to the directing by Marc Webb, as even though he does a perfectly acceptable job with the pacing and the performances, it doesn’t feel like any of his distinct qualities help this movie in the long run. His past experience working on a lot of music videos might’ve convinced Disney he could handle a musical, but it doesn’t really feel like he was the right choice to lead this movie even if he doesn’t really do anything to make it worse.

This movie got a lot of heat early on when Rachel Zegler was cast as Snow White, and while some of that came from a genuinely hateful place, there were people who took issue with her stance on the original Snow White as a character, as she didn’t like how her entire identity was based around being saved by a prince. While it is easy to view the character through an outdated lens, she was a figure that presented a lot of good-natured morals by being a cheerful and dedicated woman even while her life was in danger. She won’t have any essays written about her, but she was still a likeable character that people no doubt connected with at the time, so entirely dismissing that is a little short-sighted. With this in mind, the modern changes made to her in this film aren’t really detrimental and would almost be effective if better written, as turning her into a fallen princess who needs to build up the courage to fight for her kingdom’s freedom through peace and kindness gives her more agency while letting her retain her true-hearted nature, but the role’s lack of a character arc keeps her stuck as the same bland role model that all the Disney princesses are morphed into in these live-action remakes. Zegler does do a good job from both a performance and especially singing perspective, but most of what made Snow White distinct as a character is absent in this more stripped-down, more easily marketable modern take.

Gal Gadot also faced some criticism for being cast as the Evil Queen, with many just believing she wasn’t a good actress. While that is pretty harsh, these fears weren’t entirely unfounded as this is a pretty messy performance. In terms of the good, the look is almost an exact match with the animated counterpart, Gadot is at her best whenever a scene requires a steely stare or a condescending remark, her portrayal as the haggard witch is decently conceived, and she even gets a halfway decent villain song (Gadot can’t really sing, but at least Disney provided another villain song), but whenever the character needs to act over-the-top and petulant, it doesn’t really work, and the bare-bones nature of the original role prevents her from being anything other than a stock antagonist. While most of the newly introduced faces are largely forgettable, Jonathan is decently played by Andrew Burnap, and he shares pretty decent chemistry with Zegler. Instead of getting seven actors with Dwarfism to play the parts of the seven dwarfs (which is what Disney was going to do), they decided to rethink things after Peter Dinklage criticized them for apparent stereotyping, resulting in the CG monstrosities audiences were forced to look at on screen. Though it wouldn’t have saved anything, and the chosen actors are fine, seeing seven actors with Dwarfism as leads in a big-budget Disney film would’ve been wonderful, so to watch it be taken away by one person’s opinion (one which others within the highlighted community didn’t agree with) is very disappointing.

For an animated movie that was released during the 1930s, Snow White is still a very visually pleasing experience that showed the best of what Disney could provide and proved that animation could result in emotional reactions and tell engaging stories. The art work was graceful and vibrant, yet also surreal and even a little intimidating, it created imagery that will never be forgotten and while animation has evolved and improved with time, the film still deserves respect for what it accomplished so early on. This film’s visual design doesn’t contain any of the same creative spark as the animated version, but the production design by Kave Quinn does have some merit and keeps the film from looking entirely lifeless. Even though there’s a lot of effects work done in this film, there are still a lot of sets present, and while they never look like real locations, they still have character and emulate how they looked in the animated version pretty nicely. This can also be said for the costumes handled by Sandy Powell, as while some of the outfits feel a little ill-fitting for some of the actors (Rachel Zegler looks like she’s going to a ren faire in the traditional Snow White attire), they are all well-designed and are even decently upgraded into live-action, mainly the Queen’s more glassy and jagged regal attire.

Most of the songs are originals created by songwriting duo, Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, who had worked with Disney previously by helping write lyrics for the new songs created for the 2019 remake of Aladdin but are mainly known for creating songs for the 2016 stage musical, Dear Evan Hansen, and the 2017 cinematic musical, The Greatest Showman. While their choice of projects can be up-in-the-air, their strengths as songwriters is apparent, and they do help bring at least a new sense of life into this film. On the negative side of things, most of these numbers aren’t incredibly memorable since they all have a similar sound and vibe, they are very modern which contrasts pretty heavily with the story’s classical roots, and the lyrics are so fast, and the accompaniment is so loud that it’s often hard to hear what they’re even saying half the time. On the other hand, they’re all sung pretty well, the melodies are pretty catchy, and while there are a few too many, at least they provide something different during the story’s familiar beats.

Snow White is Disney’s latest punching bag, and while it should be great to see this lazy formula finally being treated accordingly, it seems like people are hating on it more for the skin color of the main actress, the comments she said during interviews, and the progressive changes made to the story rather than its actual problems, which just makes it hard to fully get behind. This is definitely a bad flick, as it’s confused, hardly interesting, awkwardly written, and fairly unmemorable, but to call it the worst live-action remake is a little drastic (The Lion King literally did the same story worse with lifeless visuals and got over a billion dollars for it). There is at least some effort put into the acting, production and ideas to keep it from being just another worthless retread, but given how vocal the backlash was, it definitely wasn’t worth the headache. Definitely a rotten apple, but not the coma-inducing one people claim it to be.