Live action Snow White remake’s trailer renews controversy about casting, dwarfs : NPR

Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it’s off to online uproar factory we go. The first teaser trailer for the upcoming live-action remake of Disney’s Snow White is here.

Starring Rachel Zegler as Snow White and Gal Gadot as the Evil Queen, the pair introduced the highly anticipated teaser at Disney’s D23 Expo Friday evening, with a release scheduled for March 21, 2025. Featuring first glimpses of Zegler singing “Whistle While You Work” and Gadot talking to her mirror, mirror, the trailer also showcased seven CGI dwarfs.

Written by Greta Gerwig (Barbie) and Erin Cressida Wilson (The Girl on the Train) and directed by Marc Webb ((500) Days of Summer, The Amazing Spider-Man), the people behind the film have emphasized that this latest adaptation features several ‘modern’ twists, alongside new songs from the duo Benj Pasek and Justin Paul (Dear Evan Hansen, The Greatest Showman).

Could this update to the 1937 classic be the — erm — fairest of them all? It may be a tough sell for Disney fans and other extremely online critics, whose scrutiny of the latest adaptation began years before today’s trailer drop.

Here is a brief overview of their grievances, explained.

A Snow White who’s not white enough

When news broke in 2021 that Zegler, who had her breakout role as Maria in Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story remake, would be playing the titular character, it provoked a string of racist comments on social media. People questioned why an actress of Latin descent would be playing a character with “skin white as snow.”

Zegler, who is of Polish-Colombian background, responded to the comments on X by saying she didn’t want to be dragged into the “nonsensical discourse”about her casting.

“I really, truly do not want to see it,” Zegler wrote in a post that included photos of her as a child dressed as a princess. “I hope every child knows they can be a princess no matter what.”

A reimagination deemed too “woke” by some critics

In another interview with Variety in 2022, Zegler and Gadot talked about how the story of Snow White was being adapted with a “modern edge” — one that would nix the part about Snow White being saved by a prince.

“She’s the proactive one,” Gadot said. “She’s the one who sets the terms. It’s [these factors] that make it so relevant to today.”

“She’s not going to be dreaming about true love. She’s dreaming about becoming the leader she knows she can be, and the leader that her late father told her that she could be if she was fearless, fair, brave and true,” Zegler said.

In another interview, Zegler referred to the prince as a “stalker” and said the messaging would be updated to reference a woman’s power in the modern world.

“The cartoon was made 85 years ago, and therefore it’s extremely dated when it comes to ideas of women being in roles of power and what a woman is fit for in the world,” Zegler said. “So, when we came to reimagining the actual role of Snow White, it became about the ‘fairest of them all’ meaning who is the most just and who can become a fantastic leader, and the reality is Snow White has to learn a lot of lessons about coming in to her own power before she can come into power over a kingdom.”

The comments provoked a wave of backlash on social media, notably from “anti-woke” accounts and from several conservative media outlets including the Daily Wire, which responded by saying it was producing its own version of the classic that would be written “in line with the values in which it was written.”

Others, like TikTok user @reubenwoodall, criticized Disney’s attempt to turn Snow White into a “girl boss.”

“The point of Snow White’s fairytale isn’t that she’s going to try and become a leader,” Woodall said in a video that amassed more than 1.3 million likes. “She’s not supposed to be this girl boss, leader, queen, feminist icon. And I don’t know why every reimagining, it has to be that the woman is in a position of power, otherwise it’s not feminist.”

In an interview with the British newspaper The Daily Telegraph in 2023, David Hand — the son of the 1937 animation’s original director — told the paper he felt it was a “disgrace” that Disney was “trying to do something new with something that was such a great success earlier.”

“There’s no respect for what Disney did and what my dad did … I think Walt [Disney] and he would be turning in their graves,” Hand said.

A “backward” story about seven dwarfs

In a 2022 interview, the actor Peter Dinklage criticized Disney over its plan to release the live-action remake, stating he was “taken aback” by the studio’s celebration of casting Zegler as a Latina lead while revisiting a story with an unflattering representation of dwarfs.

“It makes no sense to me. You’re progressive in one way and you’re still making that f—ing backwards story about seven dwarfs living in a cave together, what the f— are you doing, man?” said Dinklage, who has a form of dwarfism called achondroplasia, during an interview on the WTF With Marc Maron podcast.

Dinklage’s comments prompted Disney to release a statement saying it had decided to take a “different approach” with the seven character. “To avoid reinforcing stereotypes from the original animated film, we … have been consulting with members of the dwarfism community,” a Disney spokesperson told Variety.