The lead role in Walt Disney’s Snow White remake, due for release in March 2024, is played by an actress who dislikes the original Brothers Grimm fairy tale and can’t stand the studio’s 1930s animated film.

It’s a bold move for a production company that has spent almost $1 billion this year on box-office flops.

Rachel Zegler, the 22-year-old Latina actress cast as the titular princess, has been making headlines by railing against Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and its insufficiently woke themes.

“The original cartoon came out in 1937, and very evidently so,” Zegler scoffed during an interview that went viral earlier this month. “There’s a big focus on her love story with a guy who literally stalks her. Haha! Weird, weird. So we didn’t do that this time,” she quipped.

In another interview, Zegler explained that in the remake, Snow White is “not going to be saved by the price, and she’s not going to be dreaming about true love; she’s dreaming about becoming the leader she knows she can be.”

Indeed, it has been revealed that the new feminist version of the film won’t feature a prince at all. In his place is a character called Jonathan, whose scenes, Zegler joked, may yet be cut during post-production.

Wokeness has also demanded that the seven dwarfs be replaced by seven “magical creatures,” cast with actors from a melting pot of ethnicities, one of whom is a token female and only one of whom is actually a dwarf. (One wonders if Disney is engaging in dwarf erasure.)

No doubt Disney was furious when photos from the set were leaked to the press in July, showing Snow White and her miscellaneous entourage on location in Bedfordshire, England.

More furious still would the studio be that those photos have already been queued by meme generators under the title “Snow Brown and the Seven Diversity Hires.”

Satire news site The Babylon Bee has also seen the funny side, publishing a collection of headlines ranging from “Prince Immediately Regrets Waking Rachel Zegler With A Kiss After She Starts Ranting About The Patriarchy” to “After Massive Disney Layoffs, Snow White Down To Just 3 Dwarfs.”

The Babylon Bee even released its own rather humorous alternative woke ending to the movie.

On a more serious note, the son of the original Snow White director has come out swinging against Disney for its woke-ward lurch.

According to The Telegraph, “David Hand, whose father, also called David Hand, worked with Walt Disney to create the much-loved 1937 hit, said the pair would be ‘turning in their grave’ as studio bosses ‘destroy’ their creation.”

Meanwhile, the Daily Mail reports that branding experts have warned Rachel Zegler’s comments about the upcoming adaptation could have “a huge impact on ticket sales.”

Zegler seems all too unfazed by these developments. Earlier this month, she joined the picket at the SAG-AFTRA strike where actors and other union members have been protesting for, among other things, higher wages.

There, Zegler unironically told news crews, “If I’m going to stand there 18 hours in the dress of an iconic Disney princess, I deserve to be paid every hour that it is streamed online.”

As columnist Jan Moir has mused, “Maybe so, but her hot take seemed a little insensitive, given that the strike is primarily about those creatives and film crew members who are paid exponentially less than actors and actresses.”

How much woke is too much woke? Disney is set to find out in seven short months.

Of more concern than Disney’s bottom line, however, is the damage the studio is doing to its reputation, to its film catalog, and to fairy tales more generally.

Like many of the company’s recent films, Snow White is less a re-make and more a re-write: an Orwellian attempt to memory hole the precious canon of Western Civilization.

Fortunately, it seems that audiences are beginning to get fed up with it.

—

Image credit: YouTube