The live-action, woke-AF remake of “Snow White” looks like it’s going to be Disney’s next big-budget flop — and it also looks like the struggling studio already has someone primed to take the fall.
To give you an idea of how insane Hollywood budgets are, even a blockbuster success can lose money. The new Indiana Jones drove this lifelong, diehard fan away — and I wasn’t the only one. “Indiana Jones and the Diaper of Dysentery” needed to earn nearly ONE BILLION DOLLARS before showing a profit (as the Critical Drinker explained last month) but after seven weeks is still south of $400 million. For a franchise that was built on shooting fast and shooting cheap, Disney’s Lucasfilm division went unjustifiably nuts with Indy’s budget.
Even crazier, according to Variety, Tom Cruise’s new Mission: Impossible might lose money, too, despite selling millions more tickets. “After falling short of expectations,” Variety reported, Indy and Mission: Impossible “could lose nearly $100 million in their theatrical runs, according to sources familiar with the financials of similar productions.”
Of the two, Mission: Impossible could return some profit — it could go into the black somewhere north of $600 million — but nothing like Paramount hoped for based on its budget and Cruise’s star power.
“Snow White,” due out next spring, won’t cost $300 million to make and market (I don’t think), but if the early buzz is anything to go by, Disney has yet another stinker on its hands.
But if someone could be a fall guy… someone too young and inexperienced to speak in public without a script… someone like “Snow White” star Rachel Zegler. Tongues were set wagging, and not in a good way, when Zegler was cast in the role. A lovely young Latina, Zegler seems like an ill fit for a fairy tale character literally named after her snow-white skin. Worse, the Seven Dwarves — as I detailed for you last month — are now “One Dwarf and Six Painfully Diverse Magical Creatures Dressed in Garb Cast-Off from the Greater Des Moines Renaissance Faire.”
Another problem might be the banishment of Prince Charming from Snow White’s magic kingdom, something that Zegler just can’t stop talking about.
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This week — and far from the first time — Zegler trashed the beloved 1937 original animated Snow White.
“I mean, you know, the original cartoon came out in 1937 and very evidently so. Um… there’s a big focus on her love story with a guy who literally stalks her! [Laughs] Weird, weird, so we didn’t do that this time.” Instead, the “modernized” character has little use for anything aside from herself, apparently.
The poor girl got trashed for her remarks and posted a video whining about how she’d been taken out of context.
#RachelZeigler the new #SnowWhite is the most unlikable actress I have ever heard…She hates her Snow White character, and after she came out against the original movie, she is now crying over the backlash #Narcissist pic.twitter.com/o3nHtvlTs9
— John Ford (@PDXFato) August 15, 2023
She’s still young enough that I’m inclined to cut Zegler some slack… yet when Twitter user John Ford called her “the most unlikable actress I have ever heard,” I couldn’t help but agree.
Zegler has been described as a “walking PR disaster” for the movie she’s supposed to be promoting. But what if that’s no accident?
Bear with me here, but one reason I don’t bother with late-night TV anymore, despite growing up worshipping Johnny Carson, is just how earnestly scripted the so-called interviews are. Star walks on and sits down, makes a scripted quip to the host, tells a pre-approved and well-rehearsed personal anecdote, agrees to run clip from new movie, cut to commercial.
Every second of the Hollywood star’s appearance has been pre-approved by their studio, agent, management, or all three.
That’s why this comment from a Twitter user named Sarah caught my eye. She argues that Zegler “is an actress and can presumably memorize a script — not sure why Disney isn’t giving her one to deal with this PR disaster.”
“Unless,” Sarah went on, Disney means to “let her (with her unlikeable personality) take the fall because they know they produced an absolute dud.”
Disney management is all-in with the woke staff, and if Kathleen Kennedy and Kevin Feige still have jobs after running both Star Wars and the Marvel franchises into the ground, it’s safe to say nobody in a position of power at Disney can get fired for anything. So if “Snow White 2024” is yet another big-budget money-loser, why not throw the annoying actress — too young and foolish to know she’s being used — under the bus?
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