Bad apple? How Disney’s Snow White remake turned sour

In theory, it must have sounded like a good idea. At least to Hollywood movie studio executives keen to make big bucks by playing it safe with themes and stories that might be familiar to a mass audience.

A modern remake of Snow White: cashing in on the beloved Disney original with fresh stars, A-list names and a fairytale with a happy ending that everyone could enjoy.

It has not turned out that way.

Disney’s $300m-plus reboot of Snow White has generated a slew of headlines for all the wrong reasons. First, given the original relied on the outdated social mores of the 1930s, it rapidly became engulfed in a row over sexism, a debate over whether or not to keep the original seven dwarves and was plunged into the center of America’s bitter culture wars over race.

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Its lead star, Rachel Zegler, said she “hated” the original 1937 film and branded its story “weird” with a stalker-like Prince Charming character who steals a kiss from a girl in a coma who could not give consent. Then a row broke out over whether Disney should have seven dwarves as characters. Then America’s right wing piled on because of Zegler’s Latina background; the original Snow White was conceived as having very pale skin.

All in all, it showed how the temptation of instant brand recognition could be trumped by the problem that many 1930s movies contain racial and other stereotypes that are simply better left alone.

But last week, just to add to the movie’s woes, Snow White also found itself embroiled in a fight between its two biggest stars over Middle Eastern politics.

Zegler is an outspoken advocate for Palestinian rights and Gal Gadot, who plays the Evil Queen, is a high-profile Israeli actor. Not surprisingly the two have very different takes on the bloody conflict in Gaza.

After 7 October, Gadot, who starred as Wonder Woman, in an Instagram post in December called out the international community for what she said was its failure to condemn Hamas’s rape and murder of women during the attack in which more than 1,100 Israelis were killed. Gadot also reportedly organized a US screening of a film about the terrorist attack. (She then did not attend the screening out of concerns for her safety, according to the Israeli-based I24News.)

Meanwhile, Zegler, who starred in the musical film adaptation of West Side Story, posted on X in May that she had “been public with a pro-palestine stance since 2021” and in an Instagram story in January urged people to pressure government leaders to support a ceasefire in Gaza, where more than 40,000 people have been killed, according to the Gaza health ministry.

Then earlier this month, after Gadot posted the Snow White trailer and a video of a photo shoot – which included shots of her and Zegler embracing – some people on Instagram praised her and shared Israeli flag emojis; others posted “Free Palestine” and Palestinian flags.

Shortly thereafter, Zegler shared a post on X thanking people for the 120m views of the trailer and wrote in a subsequent comment: “and always remember, free palestine”.

Alia Malak, of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, wrote in an email to the Guardian that people should boycott Snow White because of Gadot.

“By choosing to directly represent genocidal Israel, Gal Gadot’s films are boycottable,” Malak wrote. The boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement “targets institutions, not individuals. Where individuals represent Israel, their activities are subject to the institutional criteria of the BDS movement.”

Malak supports a boycott of the film despite Zegler’s advocacy for Palestinians and her starring role in it.

“We deeply appreciate that lead actor Rachel Zegler has publicly expressed support for Palestinian liberation, but that is not sufficient to undo the harm done by the inclusion of Israel’s cultural ambassador,” Malak wrote.

Joel Petlin, superintendent of the Kiryas Joel school district, thinks Zegler was just trying to “to goad her co-star, who, I believe, has been subject to some level of abuse because she is Israeli”.

Still, he is not a fan of boycotts.

“I don’t know how effective they are,” said Petlin, who responded to Zegler’s post and has written op-eds for Newsweek and the Forward and leads a district that educates Hasidic Jewish students with disabilities. “There are hundreds of people that are one way or another, involved in the production, not just one star … I might personally choose not to attend it, but I’m not picketing the production.”

Israel’s consul general in New York said Zegler should be ashamed of herself and urged people to buy tickets to the next Gadot movie, according to the Israeli news outlet Ynet.

Thomas Doherty, a Brandeis University professor of American studies and historian of Hollywood cinema, said boycotts of movies can effectively further a cause. He cited the the 1940s and 1950s blacklisting of actors, directors and others involved with films because they were accused of being communists.

“It was very effective for a long time in terms of keeping both these people and also some narratives out of Hollywood, so you didn’t have an overt criticism of, let’s say, the American capitalist system until the 1960s largely because of these protests,” Doherty said.

But Amanda Ann Klein, associate professor of film studies at East Carolina University, thinks that blacklisting is different from what is happening now.

“The way we expect our musicians and our actors and our novelists to somehow mirror our political beliefs and our ethical beliefs and if they don’t, the feeling that you can’t consume their art, I think, is not particularly productive,” Klein said.

She also sees calls for boycotts of Snow White because of its stars’ beliefs as different than a protest of, say, JK Rowling, the Harry Potter author who has been accused of transphobia.

Rowling is only one person whereas as a movie has many people involved who probably have a wide range of beliefs, as evidenced by Gadot and Zegler.

In recent times film studios have often shied away from making films that audiences could see as making a political statement, said Doherty.

For example, Twisters, this year’s sequel to the 90s film Twister about storm chasers, centers around extreme weather but does not mention the climate crisis.

“I think five years ago, if Twisters had been made, there would have been a scene in which some climatologist said, ‘Oh, the reason we’re having these high tornado frequencies is because of global warming,’” Doherty said. But now, “the director and the people behind that film intentionally didn’t do it.”

There is little doubt that Snow White’s backers did not want to end up in a fight over the Middle East. But there has been no way of avoiding it. Even if, in the end, it has little meaningful impact on that debate.

“If the US government can’t make these changes in the Middle East, I don’t see how Gal Gadot’s career, Rachel Zegler’s career, is going to make a difference,” Klein said. “One thing that might happen is that celebrities will just never express their points of view publicly. If I were their PR people, I would probably suggest that.”