I know, folks, I know. Another article on “Snow White?” Really? Myself and others have already written extensively about the reasons for its utterly predictable failings, so why beat a dead horse? My intention here, however, is not to examine the film again, but rather the reactions on the Left to its dismal box office performance. My question is what, if anything, has the left learned from this self-imposed fiasco? So this will be my last Snow White-related article. Maybe.
Public relations crisis “expert” Sarah Schmidt opined that it wasn’t wokeness that killed the Disney remake, but rather Disney’s failure to arm Rachel Zegler “with a clear message or standing beside her when her comments went viral.”
Au contraire, Rachel had a message that was crystal clear: I’m a privileged, antisemitic theater brat who is openly telling half the country I think they’re scum. There’s no way Rachel was going to stick to any “clear message” given to her by Disney. That wouldn’t be “empowering,” would it? We have a Patriarchy to overthrow, don’t we?
And this is the behavior you expected any corporation with a mind towards self-preservation, not to mention profit, to “stand beside”?
Schmidt’s evasions are the least unreasonable of excuses and poor explanations. Other leftist outlets missed the mark by even greater distances.
Over at Cosmopolitan, Olivia Truffaut-Wong assumes (with zero evidence) that Snow White’s dismal box office performance was due to racism rather than Zegler’s controversial tweets. “What do Rachel Zegler’s political beliefs have to do with Snow White?” she wonders. Gee, Truffaut-Wong, I dunno. What do Elon Musk’s political beliefs have to do with Tesla dealerships? All we conservatives did was peacefully boycott a movie. None of us have firebombed a theater for showing Snow White, so remember that.
Variety magazine blames the egregious overuse of special effects for the film’s poor performance, and dismisses Zegler’s controversial comments as “unrelated topics.” Unrelated? Zegler dehumanized half the country. Can you concede that, just maybe, this impacted the public perception more than an overreliance on CGI and green screens?
Ah, but per the magazine, we are part of the problem. The Evil Queen is a “fascist who brings a chill to the land,” it informs us, making her a metaphor for our “current regime.”
Somebody named William Bibbiani over in some forgotten corner of the internet called The Wrap writes, in dead seriousness, that “you all owe [Zegler] an apology” for all the criticism we’ve heaped upon her. Per Bibbiani, she allegedly delivered a masterful performance worthy of our praise. He reduces all our criticisms, regardless of their validity, to — wait for it — RACISM! And regarding the seeming ease with which Snow White finally deposes the Evil Queen in the film, he laments, “If that’s all it took to end fascism we’d be living in a very different world right now.”
I’d like to sit these morons down and ask them to explain, without the aid of Google, what their idea of “fascism” is.
Related: D-Day for Disney as ‘Snow White’ Opens This Weekend
Stephanie Zacharek at Time gushes sycophantically over this same puddle of woke regurgitation. She chides the Disney films of earlier generations for “avoid[ing] controversy to the point of toothlessness” (yeah — they’re cartoons for children) and praises the Snow White remake as exactly what’s needed in “an era of government-sanctioned cruelty.” A true leftist, she thinks the primary, if not the sole, purpose of children’s movies is not to entertain but to push radical political messages upon unsuspecting kindergarteners.
Whether or not the producers meant for Zegler’s interactions with the dwarves to be some sort of girl-boss assertion of independence from the presumptuous expectations of slothful menfolk, Zacharek nevertheless sees it that way. She angrily writes, “In this version, Snow White puts the dwarves to work, giving them each a job and acting as a kind of foreman. The 2025 Snow White has enough work to do, getting her kingdom back. The dwarves can make their own damn beds.”
To which the dwarves, having enough work to do performing backbreaking labor in a cave mining jewels for princesses to wear, might retort, “Build your own damn cottage.”
But echoing Zacharek, the insufferable bores at NPR drone on about how one of the main shortcomings of the film was that audiences only hear about how Snow White’s father inspired her, and that we never hear about how her mother might have inspired her. Can’t have a positive male role model, can we?
Over at USA Today, Sara Pequeno goes on a bizarre pro-Palestinian rant that reads as if penned by the Hamas propaganda wing. She insists that the film isn’t flopping because of Zegler’s antisemitic posts, but then goes on to insinuate exactly that by attacking her critics. She also “can’t help but wonder” if Zegler is receiving such harsh backlash because of — yep, you guessed it — her race.
During its second weekend, Snow White only earned $14.2 million domestically, a 66% drop from its already dismal opening weekend. If current trends continue, the film is forecasted to gross a total of $295 million when all is said and done. When all production and marketing costs are factored in, the film needs about $600 million to break even.
Zegler’s juvenile antics helped Disney lose a third of a billion dollars. That’s not a resume detail you want to underline and boldface for the recruiters to salivate over. She might not care how Trump voters react to her, but she should care how producers and CEOs react to her. If they want to keep their jobs, none of them are coming anywhere near her for a very long time.
Rachel Zegler has destroyed her career. She did so not so much with her controversial tweets, which can always be walked back and apologized for. Americans are a forgiving people. No, she destroyed her career by digging in, tripling down, and exposing to potential audiences just what an arrogant narcissist she is.
There were certainly other factors that contributed to the film’s failure, but nobody knows the name of the person who replaced the dwarves with “magical creatures.” Nobody knows the name of the person who then switched to creepy CGI dwarves. Nobody knows the name of the person who removed the prince from the plot and rewrote the entire script through woke eyes.
But everybody will remember Zegler’s contribution to this train wreck. That might not be fair to Zegler, but she asked for it by dragging her personal politics into so much of this. If you take a baseball bat to a hornet’s nest, you can’t cry foul when you get stung.
But she’s only 23, and in our infantilized society, 23 is the new eight. The magazine writers and NPR automatons, the supposed adults in the room, are only digging the grave for the career of the next up-and-coming activist celebrity. Even socialist rags like The Guardian and Huffington Post derided the woke nonsense of this film.
Take the pulse of this nation. Woke lost, and lost bigly.
So, to repeat my opening question, what has the left learned from all this? Absolutely nothing.
And that’s to be expected. Leftism is a cult, and both Zegler and her fellow cultists are behaving exactly how cult members behave, i.e. by covering their ears and screaming “RACIST!”, “FASCIST!”, or whatever other scare word they’ve been conditioned to bleat. They are impressively impervious to facts, evidence, reason, and logic.
But by all means, keep doing what you’re doing. Blow another third of a billion dollars on your next nihilistic dismantling of a cinematic masterpiece. If you were government employees, DOGE would have had you executed for treason by now. But since you’re flushing only your own money, then full speed ahead.
In a functioning society, idiocy either self-corrects or is taken care of via natural selection. Since you woke cultists are incapable of both the humility and the critical thinking necessary to evolve and grow, we’ll be telling our kids about you when they read about you in their history books.
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