The Dark Herald Does Not Recommend Snow White (2025)

The Marvels was better

Don’t read anything by Tanith Lee before seeing a terrible fantasy movie.  As bad as it was always going to be, it made watching live (for values of live) action Snow White so much worse. 

This was never going to be a good movie.  It really isn’t possible for Disney to do that anymore.  Everything Disney produces now is a shake and bake-homogenized visual content product rather than actual entertainment. Current year Disney films are creatures of diversity quota check boxes, audience polls, and the whims of studio heads who have nothing that approaches the creative instincts of a Michael Eisner or a Jeffery Katzenberg and certainly not a Walt Disney. This was all completely expected and given the amount of reshoots it had, I knew going into the theater that it was going to be another cobbled together Disney Frankenstein movie.  

But this was cinematic incompetence.

This project was a bad idea from the very start for one very simple reason.  Whatever got made (even if it was exceptional) could not be compared favorably to the original version. This is largely because the general public likes to think Snow White (1937) is better than it is.  Don’t get me wrong the OG is not a bad movie at all but it is a primitive one.  How could it not be? Steamboat Willie came out a mere nine years before Snow White was released.  Think about that for a second, that is the same span of time separating 2016 from today. Walt went that far that fast. I am not going to bring up the 1937 film’s flaws because they aren’t flaws, it’s just a lack of technical development. And from a technical standpoint it was unheard of achievement in 1937: 

“The budget came in at over a million dollars, which was insane during the Depression.  He nearly broke his company, his employees and himself.  Almost every aspect of “Disney’s Folly” was venturing into unchartered territory.  Publicity material stated that the production employed thirty-two animators, one hundred-two assistants, one hundred sixty-seven “in-betweeners,” twenty layout artists, twenty-five artists doing watercolor backgrounds, sixty-five effects animators, and one hundred fifty-eight female inkers and painters. Two million illustrations were made using one thousand five hundred shades of paint.

After it launched Dorothy Grafly remarked, ”Walt Disney has at last given the world what should have come through established art channels — the creative exploit of the animated cartoon in color, probably the first genuinely American art since that of the indigenous Indian.“

On its release it was a seismic shift in the pop culture landscape. It was as big as Star Wars in 1977 or Titanic 1997. When the Academy completely snubbed Snow White the public outcry was so bad they created a special one-time-only, and one of a kind Oscar for it.

“Why yes, this is my shit eating grin!”

This was literally the movie that built the Walt Disney Company.  No remake, even a high quality one was going to reach the heights that it did. 

But the 2025 flick wasn’t even trying.  The makers had clearly given up all hope for it half way through the production. It was creative dejection being dredged across the big screen.  The makers should have put a text block before the opening credits, “This motion picture is the product of our bad life choices.  Don’t do what we did and never work for Disney.”

It starts off, rather unpromisingly, with cg woodland critters opening  the same fairy tale book as the 1937 version, giving you the uncomfortable feeling that you are going to be seeing Enchanted (2007) played straight.  Which is pretty much exactly what’s about to happen. 

The film decided that all things being equal it needed to provide an explanation for Snow WHITE’s melanin surplus.  She was born in a blizzard… And the snow was white. 

Moving on. 

The king and queen run a communism-that-works-just-like-Marx-said-it-would magic kingdom, with an economy based on apples.  This is a fantasy after all. 

The queen dies off-camera and the king acquires a mysterious beautiful Israeli queen with evil Jew sorcery or something.  Anyway, the hippie king, decides to get killed defending his borders, although given the ethnic make up of his realm it’s rather surprising he had any.

The Queen takes over, puts princess Snow White in rags and makes the bitch work for a living. The narrator moans about her monetarist economic policy as opposed to the previous regime’s apple based currency. 

Snow White is singing about… I’ve already forgotten what she was singing about. She never stops singing.  This movie had so many songs it was nearly an opera. After the first of many, many, many songs she catches a thief who looks precisely like Wesley from the Princess Bride, stealing food from the castle.

The queen has him lashed to the gate and left there.  Snow White tries to talk the queen into giving the apple based currency thing a try again.  The queen rightfully kicks her out of the throne room for being a communist retard.

Snow White then rescues Wesley the Thief. Just to be clear, there is no Prince Charming in this thing, Disney has been repelled by the concept for a while.  Remember Once Upon a Time? Prince Charming wasn’t actually prince in that one, he was a fraud, just like the makers of this film.

The Magic Mirror being at some pains to provide a believable explanation as to why Rachel Zegler could be considered in any way shape or form hotter than Gal Gadot, lamely declares she’s fairer in that she’s a good Communist.

The Queen makes her first real mistake and summons her African-American Huntsman.  Since this is a Tumblrina kingdom, a black man is fundamentally incapable of committing any kind of evil act. Meaning she should have farmed out her dirty work to a white man if she’d wanted the job done right?  I’m pretty sure that isn’t the message the filmmakers wanted to send.  Regardless, the Evil Queen chose Inclusivity and she paid the price.

Now it goes from exhaustingly dull to dazzlingly incomprehensible.

I am going to grant that what the filmmakers originally had in mind was probably better than the course they were forced to adopt when Iger started panicking into micro-management mode. OR if not better at least more coherent. This is where the emergency infusions of CG are injected into this movie.

The Huntsman does the “I just can’t do it!” thing and sends Snow White off into the woods, likely to die of starvation unless she finds an apple tree.  The trees she does find are evil Ents who grab Snow White, giving you the very worrying impression you’re about to see the Evil Dead Thing in a children's movie (I mean this is current year Disney), but then the Ent shoves her into a hole in the ground.  And she is immediately and inexplicably drowning in a pond.  She gets out of the Magical (one assumes) pond and finds her way to the Dwarfs’ cottage.  Being an entitled Marxist decides that what’s theirs is hers and she takes whatever she wants before stealing their beds. All of them.

The CG Abominations in Eyes of God come back from their mine and find the intruder.  Snow White in the original, does the feminine thing; she cooks and cleans for the Dwarfs as a way to earn her keep and they come to love her for it.  Here, Snow White demands that they do a better job of cleaning their house for her and bosses them around while dancing and singing uselessly like any good Marxist. Domestic incompetence is the hallmark of any proud feminist.

Now we run into Wesley the Thief and his Seven Performance Artists.  These were probably meant to be the original seven-somethings that replaced the seven dwarves.  They were all obviously meant to have their own distinct names, characters, and personas.  We never find out what most of their names are and they have almost no lines and what they do have are shouted perorations, clearly meant to be the climax of that character’s story arc.  That doesn’t work when the story pole vaults over the arc.

Things only get more confusing as it goes on.  We finally get to Snow White and the apple (no comb, no girdle and none expected). She’s mostly dead. The dwarfs now feel mostly Glummy, and set her out on a rock. No glass casket either, just put her out on rock to rot, apparently Disney Dwarfs practice excarnation.  Wesley the Thief interrupts this “Sky Burial” with some softcore necrophilia and Snow Whitish wakes up.

Snow White promptly leads a revolt against the Evil Queen by singing another song and slowly walking to the castle.  The Queen points out that she has been the best ruler they’ve ever had but Snow White remembers the guards names so they turn on the Queen.  The Queen runs inside and breaks her magic mirror (sure, why not), which turns her into CG ash and she gets sucked into another dimension rather than get chased by dwarfs off a cliff like in the original.  This was done with a potential sequel in mind that will never happen.

The kingdom dresses up in white to celebrate the return of Communist rule and sings some more.  Snow White is now queen, she will never marry or have children so the kingdom has exchanged one crone queen for another.  They are all very stupid.

I left the theater sketching out my own fan fiction for this glorious socialist monarchy.  It involved Azharan. 

Everything about this movie was so much worse than it had to be. Technical aspects were so weak it looked like a made for streaming movie.

Everything related to the Dwarfs was done entirely on a CG soundstage. Golden Hour is the period of time right before sunset where the light is golden before turning dusky red and they are always shown in Golden Hour light. Every single scene with them. If a character is in normal light but then comes in contact with Dwarf, it is suddenly Golden Hour.  Eternal sunset is weird and off putting but the grotesqueries masked as Disney Dwarfs are so much more so.  They look like they were churned together at the last second because they were.  This isn’t the uncanny valley, it’s the Uncanny Grand Canyon.

The production set design looked for all the world like it did come out of Enchanted.  The casting is the usual Wizards of the Coast shotgunning of random ethnicities throughout an unmistakably European setting. If you’re going to do this, then try to sell it by adding bits of clothing and architecture from the places you brought these people from.  They wouldn’t do that of course, the point and purpose is to turn any and all European fantasy settings into Clown World fantasy.

Was there anything I liked?  Not really but I will say (and I can’t believe I’m saying it), that Rachel Zegler was the best thing in it.  I always try to give credit where it’s due and she did her level best to carry this horrifying accretion of random film parts on her diminutive shoulders.  She earned her paycheck and I will not deny it.  

Gal Gadot on the other hand couldn’t keep up her end of things.  A Disney Evil Queen has to be not so much a scene chewer as a scene gorger.

Gadot was trying but she simply has too limited a range as an actress. This was not a performance that could be saved in the cutting room splicing together her best takes and they were trying to do that, and it couldn’t have been more apparent that someone else did all her singing for her. I really don’t understand why they went with Gadot…

(pauses)

(googlegooglegoogle)

Gadot has 103 million Insta followers.  That’s why she got cast. At a mere 2 million Zegler’s casting is nearly inexplicable.

And truth be said, Zegler is unquestionably the reason this very questionable project failed at the box office.  Rachel Zegler turned out to be a promotional holocaust, incinerating the box office of a film that was getting burned down before the cameras rolled.  

Shortly after the film went into serious development Peter Dinkledge was on a podcast, allegedly high as kite, and gave a rambling, nearly incoherent denouncement of Disney hiring dwarves to play the Seven Dwarfs.  It was enough to make Disney Burbank shit itself in Woke Panic, scrap the traditional retelling of the story and redevelop the project as a Black Lives Matter-friendly tale with a heavy emphasis on spoon feeding socialism to toddlers.  

Then during the worst timed strike in Hollywood history, some outfit that needed clicks (I don’t remember who) dug up some footage of Rachel Zegler at D23, which effectively called in a white phosphorus artillery bombardment on her own position.  

It’s not that Zegler is uniquely horrible.  Far from it. Most theater kids are as obnoxious as she is. However, most have to go through some period of time where humility is forced down their throats. Fighting their way up from the chorus line and waiting tables to make ends meet. Eating crow when the star upstages them during their single line of dialog. That kind of thing.  Rachel Zegler on the other hand was hurled straight from singing on YouTube to headlining Speilberg’s West Side Story as Maria. She never learned how to not be obnoxious.  She seems spoiled and vicious on Twitter but most people her age are. 

Regardless, every time she opened her mouth she not only stuck her foot in it but she would inevitably find some way to fit the other foot in there with it. Everyone hated her and by extension Disney for hiring her.

Then came the leaked production stills of the Wesley and the Seven Clown World Thieves and the internet feeding frenzy began. 

I suspect there was always some private objections to deleting Grumpy and company at Disney but I also suspect Iger loved the Wesley and the Seven Socialists. However with a flame war raging, the manifestly undeniable problem of a Snow White without the seven dwarfs was finally made obvious and so the seven horrifying abominations were cooked up in CG hell.

This was considered preferable to hiring real dwarves.

In 1937 Walt Disney nearly broke his company, his employees, his family and himself chasing perfection.  By the standards of his day, he succeeded.  A movie with the craftsmanship of original Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is impossible to achieve today. That film has an unadjusted take of $418 million.  

As for this new version, they weren’t even trying past a certain point.  It was going to be a disaster.  They knew it. There was nothing they could do but shove it in theaters and pay back what they could to backers. It brought in $43 million domestic and about the same amount in FBO. This isn’t a bomb, it's an extinction level event.  

Will Disney learn anything from it?  

Don’t be silly, Lilo and Stitch Live Action launches in May.

In summary: The Dark Herald Does Not Recommend Snow White  (1 / 5)