The curse of Disney’s Snow White

One of the early decisions David Zaslav made after becoming the CEO of Warner Bros Discovery in 2022 was to cancel the release of Batgirl, a summer blockbuster the studio had spent $90 million making. According to industry insiders, Zaslav thought the politically correct reimagining of the comic book character, whose best friend in the film is played by a trans actor, would be box office poison. Better to take the tax write-off, he decided, than spend tens of millions of dollars trying to market the film to an American public that was fed up with being lectured by virtue-signalling Hollywood liberals. Incidentally, the highest-grossing film of 2022 in the US was Top Gun: Maverick.

Robert Iger, the CEO of the Walt Disney Company, must be regretting he didn’t take a leaf out of Zaslav’s book and pull the plug on Snow White, the studio’s $270 million live-action remake of its 1937 animated feature. The film has been so beset by controversies – all of them linked to identity politics – that Disney has cancelled the UK premiere. There was a stripped-down one in Los Angeles last Saturday, with a small group of hand-picked photographers and journalists, but the only interviews the cast did were with Disney employees. Four days earlier, the lead actress, Rachel Zegler, attended a party in Spain where she sang a song from the film in front of Alcázar de Segovia Castle, supposedly the inspiration for the castle in the original. She did not talk to any journalists.