Disney’s Snow White film is struggling at the box office, and Rachel Zegler is being thrown under the bus. It’s unedifying.
Comfortably one of the ugliest stories to report on in movieland these past few months centres around the newly-released Snow White movie from Disney. The film was in the crosshairs of the hate brigade in the run-up to its release, was review-bombed, and now the blame game for its box office underperformance is in full swing. It’s an unedifying sight.
A necessary caveat: those who paid their money and didn’t like the film at all, no issue with that at all. I’m going to suggest that a lot of the hate being aimed at Snow White is from people who haven’t watched the film, and who just like lobbing virtual bricks at things. Their tactics are plainly effective.
The movie’s box office return is likely to fall far short of its production budget, although this being a Disney live action production, it’ll keep earning for a long time to come. Still, we’ve now seen a big piece at Variety dissecting what went wrong, and insiders appear to be pointing the finger of blame at Rachel Zegler. Notwithstanding the fact that her performance was perhaps the most praised element of the movie, Zegler – a woman in her early 20s – is the one Disney appears to blame. Her social media posts in the run up to the film’s release have been regularly cited, and now the son of the movie’s producer has poured petrol on the flames.
Rachel Zegler is a terrific actor, and maybe she’d do things differently, maybe she wouldn’t. Who knows. But the unedifying pile on against her is, I’d suggest, a disgrace. Snow White is a film that went through multiple reshoots, had around $300m spent on it, and in the end, failed to find an audience. Is that all Rachel Zeger’s fault, or is she the convenient scapegoat?
Disney is a big company, with lots of money, and can take the hits against it. Rachel Zegler is one human being. On screen, where it should matter, her casting has been vindicated. It seems, though, that that’s become the least important thing in all of this.
