Crew
Director – Marc Webb, Screenplay – Erin Cressida Wilson, Producers – Jared LeBoff & Marc Platt, Photography – Mandy Walker, Music – Jeff Morrow, Songs – Justin Paul & Benji Pasek, Visual Effects Supervisor – Max Wood, Animation Supervisor – Greg Fisher, Visual Effects – Cheap Shot VFX (Supervisor – Ben Perrott & Jon Van Hoey Smith), Crafty Apes (Supervisor – Blake Goedde), Framestore (Supervisor – Sean Alan Schur), Lola | VFX, MPC (Supervisor – Sebastian Raets & Chris Uyede, Animation Supervisors – Josh Cooper & Tracie Horie), Passion Pictures & Vitality Visual Effects (Supervisor – Jiwoong Kim), Makeup & Prosthetics Designer – Nadia Stacey, Prosthetics Designer – Mark Coulier, Production Design – Kave Quinn, Choreography – Mandy Moore. Production Company – Disney.
Cast
Rachel Zegler (Snow White), Gal Gadot (Evil Queen), Andrew Burnap (Jonathan), Andrew Barth Feldman (Dopey), Jeremy Swift (Doc), Titus Burgess (Bashful), Martin Klebba (Grumpy), George Salazar (Happy), Jason Kravits (Sneezy), Andy Grotelueschen (Sleepy), Ansu Kabia (Huntsman), Patrick Page (Magic Mirror), George Appleby (Quigg), Emilia Faucher (Young Snow White), Colin Carmichael (Farno), Samuel Baxter (Scythe), Jimmy Johnston (Finch), Dujonna Gift (Maple), Idriss Kargbo (Bingley), Jaih Betote (Norwich), Hadley Fraser (Good King), Lorena Andrea (Good Queen)
Plot
After his wife dies, the king remarries. He then disappears and the queen inherits his crown. The queen then exercises iron control over the kingdom, including making the king’s daughter, the princess Snow White, a servant. One day, Snow White encounters Jonathan, an out-of-work actor who has joined a group of bandits in the woods, after he sneaks into the palace to steal food. The queen catches Jonathan and his him bound to the gates, but Snow White frees him, earning the queen’s wrath. When the queen’s magic mirror tells her that she is no longer the fairest of them all but that Snow White is, the queen responds by ordering her huntsman to take Snow White out into the woods and kill her. However, he is unable to bring himself to do so and lets Snow White free. She falls into the company of seven dwarf miners. When the queen’s mirror alerts her that Snow White is still alive, the queen sets out to eliminate her.
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) was the first feature-length animated film. Disney had been making animated shorts for a decade and gained phenomenal success with his Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse shorts, but everyone predicted Snow White would be a flop. Of course, it wasn’t and the great era of Disney animation was born.
The story of Snow White was first written down by the Brothers Grimm in 1812. There have been numerous film adaptations – Disney hadn’t even made the first animated version, which would be a 1933 Betty Boop short. Other variants include Snow White and the Three Stooges (1961), Cannon Films’ Snow White (1987), the dark adult Snow White: A Tale of Terror (1997), Snow White (2001), the modernised Sydney White (2007), an extraordinary ballet adaptation Snow White (2009), adult works like Mirror Mirror (2012) and Snow White and the Huntsman (2012) and appearances in fairytale parodies and crossovers such as The 10th Kingdom (2002), Shrek the Third (2007), Once Upon a Time (2011-8) and The 7th Dwarf (2014). Disney have variously played around with the myth, including spoofing it in Enchanted (2007) and allowing Snow White to make a cameo in Ralph Breaks the Internet (2018). There were also plans by Disney circa 1979 to conduct an SF remake called Snow White and the Seven Robots, which never came to pass but I would love to see just because it sounds so outlandish.
In the 2010s, Disney embarked on a major campaign of recycling their animated films in a series of live-action remakes (although this had been going on all the way back to the 1990s). The trend was started with the huge success of the Tim Burton Alice in Wonderland (2010) and was followed by remakes of other animated films such as Maleficent (2014), Cinderella (2015), The Jungle Book (2016), Beauty and the Beast (2017), Aladdin (2019), Dumbo (2019), Lady and the Tramp (2019), The Lion King (2019), Mulan (2020), Cruella (2021), Pinocchio (2022), The Little Mermaid (2023), Peter Pan and Wendy (2023) and Moana (2026).
Snow White was laden with controversy before it even opened. Peter Dinklage publicly slammed it for perpetuating dwarf stereotypes. There was criticism of the casting of Mexican actress as someone who is supposed to have skin ‘fairer than snow’ (a phrase that has been eliminated from the script). Erin Cressida Wilson was attacked for conducting feminist revisionism in making statements that the prince was irrelevant to the story. The most inflammatory material came when Rachel Zegler spoke out publicly against the massive genocide being conducted by Israel in Palestinian territories and the US government’s unquestioning support for it, at the same time as co-star Gal Gadot gave whole-hearted support for the Israeli regime. (There are claims made that Zegler stirred things up so much that Gadot had to be given a security detail). Zegler received massive backlash for this from the pro-Israel lobby (who have conducted campaigns to publicly savage others who have spoken up like Jeremy Corbyn and Roger Waters) to the extent that she is now considered unemployable in Hollywood. The film’s premiere and response ended up being muted. The producers blamed Zegler (but surprisingly not Gadot) for the film’s supposed box-office flop (more on that below).
Snow White is directed by Marc Webb who first appeared with (500) Days of Summer (2009) and then the duo of Andrew Garfield Spider-Man film The Amazing Spider-Man (2012) and The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014), which I think were better than the public seems to regard them. After that, Webb made a couple of other non-genre films with Gifted (2017) and The Only Living Boy in New York (2017).
Despite Snow White being considered a box-office flop, it should be noted that the film currently sits as the sixth highest grossing film of 2025 and has earned over $200 million at the box-office as of this writing (May 2025) – in other words, the term flop is being used not as a measure of box-office earnings where $200+ million would be a massive success by any other film’s metric but the measure of budget outlay vs box-office returns. With the news that the live-action remake of Tangled (2010) being cancelled immediately following Snow White’s ‘flop’, the welcome upshot may be that we are seeing the end of this trend of Disney live-action remakes, although it should be noted that there is still the live-action Lilo & Stitch (2025) and Moana (2026) waiting in the wings, which may well turn things around.
As Snow White arrived on screen, there seemed to be the determination by some critics (mainly in the US) to champion the film as a backlash against the controversy. On the other side of the coin, the IMDB seems to be experiencing review bombing that has led Snow White to have receive an extremely low 1.7 ranked rating. Based on some of the backlash reviews, I had hopes that Snow White might be one that stood out amongst the majorly uninspired Disney live-action films.
Among the numerous variations on the story, this version can be considered a direct remake of the 1937 film. It replicates many familiar aspects – Snow White’s trademark yellow and blue dress; she being surrounded by adoring woodland creatures wherever she goes; a close replication of the dwarfs house in the woods; and a recreation of the scene where Snow White finds the woods sinisterly anthropomorphised; while the score adapts four songs from the original.
On the other hand, there are some undeniable changes. One of these is that the prince is deemphasized. He’s now rewritten as a commoner – an out-of-work actor who leads a group of peasant bandits. Erin Cressida Wilson made comments about how Snow White’s romance has been made almost irrelevant in the film, but he is there, romance does occur and she does receive true love’s kiss (possibly included among the reshoots on Disney’s part). There are also a number of grating modernisms in the dialogue – Snow White refers to ‘retail therapy’, ‘slumber parties’, ‘liminal spaces’ and now Sleepy suffers from ‘narcoleptic cataplexy’ – that keep wrenching you out of a suspension of disbelief.
I think the 1937 original is one of the greatest of all Disney animated films. I just didn’t feel the same love when it came to the remake. It feels as though the Disney live-action remake machine has processed everything through focus groups so much that they have taken anything interesting out of it. One of these is the decision to play the film as a Musical. Like the recent Wicked: Part 1 (2024), the big Broadway musical with choreographed numbers and people opening up to sing from their hearts is just not a genre that does anything for me. (Although, that comes down to personal preference and I have no wish to decry those who love the genre). For me, with the film launching into a succession of song and dance numbers from fairly much the first scene, I was automatically detracting one star from my review.
And then there is the look of the film. I don’t know what the thinking process at Disney was but for some reason the decision was made to design the film with the woodlands and surrounding villages and palace as hyper-real picture postcard depictions highlighted in beams of sunlight and surrounded by the brightest of foliage and cooing and twittering woodland animals. There is a lack of grounded reality in any of it ie. when you see the villagers at work, there is nothing in any of it that seems like it is real people living in this world as opposed to extras doing what they do on a set.
There is also the depictions of the dwarfs. For some reason, the decision has been made not to cast dwarf actors – one dwarf actor Martin Klebba does appear among the dwarves and another George Appleby among the bandits, but all the other dwarf parts are played by regular-sized actors that have then been replaced by CGI figures. However, it proves a major case of Uncanny Valley and the dwarfs just look very distractingly like they are CGI effects reacting with Snow White. This and the unreal setting gives you a major inability to engage in what is happening with what is up on screen.
And then there is the casting. I want to defend Rachel Zegler because of her awful demonisation in the US press and on social media, but have to remind myself just because a person supports your views doesn’t mean that you should suspend critical faculties. She was a hot property as a result of West Side Story (2021) but here seems swallowed up by the production around her. She does fine when it comes to the singing, but I looked to her performance and failed to find anywhere where it feels like she is emoting with genuine feeling as opposed to standing on a stage reciting lines and finding her cues. On the other hand, Gal Gadot, someone I have no desire to defend, takes the opportunity to chew the scenery and give a grandly evil performance. The film becomes very watchable whenever she is around.
Trailer here