Disney needs to stop doing live-action remakes, says Ed Power. Photo / Disney
OPINION
Snow White has given “heigh-ho” the heave-ho. In newly-resurfaced interviews, the star of Disney’s upcoming live-action remake of the Brothers Grimm classic has described Walt Disney’s 1937 original as “scary” and a poor fit for modern audiences.
“I just mean that it’s no longer 1937,” said Rachel Zegler, who comes to the dark fairytale after a triumphant debut in Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story. “She’s not going to be saved by the prince, and she’s not going to be dreaming about true love.”
Nothing wrong with a fearless Snow White sticking it to the patriarchy: the new Snow White is co-scripted by Greta Gerwig, whose pink-emblazoned Barbie cleverly blended feminism and brand extension. And Zegler is correct about Disney’s classic 1930s and 1940s animations making for sometimes uncomfortable watching today. See adorable Jiminy Cricket salivating over scantily clad showgirls in 1940′s Pinocchio.
But the backlash against Zegler’s comments confirms Disney’s strategy of remaking its classic animations using flesh and blood actors as a movie-going mine-field. Often, these projects can only seem worth the effort by distancing themselves from the original; which, in turn, carries the risk of Disney tarnishing its legacy and triggering the fanbase. But if a new version stays slavishly true to the original, why does it even need to exist?
Disney’s live-action remakes of beloved cartoons are an ambitious feat of cinematic necromancy. And until recently, they proved supremely lucrative. Jon Favreau’s The Lion King remake from 2019 cleared $1.6 billion at the box office (largely rendered in CGI, it barely even counted as live-action). Even more extraordinarily, the disposable Tim Burton/Johnny Depp tilt at Alice in Wonderland surpassed a billion.
Yet that golden streak has started to lose its gloss, and there is a case that Disney’s remake fixation is doing more harm than good. Many of its recent remakes have flopped. Burton’s flabby version of Dumbo from 2019 is believed to have barely earned back its $170 million budget. A live-action Mulan stiffed - even in China, where Disney had expected it to triumph - as did the 101 Dalmatians origin story Cruella, which made $233.5 million in 2021. The recently rebooted The Little Mermaid took 32 days to rake in $500m - compared to the 10 days in which Favreau’s The Lion King clocked up the same total. And let’s not even mention Robert Zemeckis’ 2022 Pinocchio remake, which starred Tom Hanks but was still dumped on Disney+ with a resounding thud.
Some of the negative factors are beyond Disney’s control. For instance, trolls. Some sections of the internet have taken umbrage with Zegler’s casting as Snow White, based on her Colombian heritage. They will be horrified to discover the 1937 movie was similarly disloyal to the source material. Where is the cannibalism and torture so prominent in the Grimms’ original?
Still, a 2023 edition of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was always going to be problematic. Game of Thrones star Peter Dinklage, who has a form of dwarfism called achondroplasia, has criticised Disney for rebooting a cartoon in which “dwarfs” were depicted as bearded man-children with names such as Dopey and Sleepy.
“I was a little taken aback when they [Disney] were very proud to cast a Latina actress as Snow White, but you’re still telling the story of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” he said on Marc Maron’s WTF podcast. “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?”
Those sentiments were echoed by the Restricted Growth Association in the UK. “I very much stand with Peter Dinklage on the disappointment and irritation towards Disney for the remake of Snow White,” Rhonda Cutmore, a member of the association, told the Telegraph.
“As a 46-year-old woman with restricted growth, this story has always had a negative impact on me. Not just the physical characteristics, but the labelling of ‘Dopey’ and ‘Bashful’, were not helpful in the playground.”
(Such feelings are not universal within the restricted growth community. When a pantomime production of Snow White in Leicester was renamed Snow White and her Seven Friends in 2015, actor Warwick Davis, who has dwarfism, described the decision as patronising. “As a short actor, I want to be given the choice about whether I appear in panto or not,” he said. “I don’t want someone making that decision for me.”)
Whether or not on-screen dwarfs are problematic, the difficulty is that Disney has decided to have it both ways. Photos from the set of the upcoming movie show Snow White merrily rolling along with seven “magical friends”. But are they supposed to be dwarfs? Or just random eco-warrior types sniffing out an illegal rave in the woods?
It’s hard to say. They look vaguely like the original’s troupe: they are bearded, some are short, others are not. The big departure from the cartoon is that all are young (ageism being a prejudice with which Disney is okay). They also have an air of ‘hey nonny-nonny’ absurdity: with their colourful robes and twigs-in-hair styling, they could be a Jethro Tull cover band playing a 3am stage up a tree in Glastonbury. If this is what ends up on-screen, Disney will be left looking distinctly dopey.
So why does Disney persist? One credible theory is that Disney’s remake obsession was rooted in the spectacular failure of John Carter, its 2012 space opera based on a niche Edgar Rice Burroughs novel that became one of the biggest bombs in history. Grossing just $284m on a $306m budget, it resulted in losses of $200m and caused Disney’s share price to fall by 1 per cent. For good measure, it also led to the resignation of studio chairman Rich Ross - then a favourite of current Disney CEO Bob Iger.
The lesson to executives was plain: new, original ideas are dangerous. Resolving to never again take anything remotely resembling a risk, Disney’s next step was to purchase the Star Wars franchise via its takeover of Lucasfilm - a deal signed, sealed and delivered mere months after the John Carter disaster. Then, it began pumping out those lucrative retreads of familiar Disney hits – starting in earnest with Cinderella in 2015.
Ever since, it has gone at the grand project like a family of Grimm Brothers dwarfs truffling for coal. But with The Little Mermaid coming and going without a splash and the new Snow White already annoying Disney purists, there are grounds for wondering whether this period of looking back rather than forward may have reached its natural end. (Disney’s Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny and Haunted Mansion, more retrograde takes on old properties, have also underperformed at the box office.)
Disney doesn’t appear to think so. A spinoff from Guy Ritchie’s Aladdin with Billy Magnussen returning as Prince Anders is in the works, while Game of Thrones writer Bryan Cogman has been lined up for a tilt at T.H. White’s Sword in the Stone (you wonder if it will include the author’s ranting disapproval of independence for the Celtic nations). Plans are also proceeding for a remake of 2010′s Tangled and another of Moana, which is all of seven years old.
Most bizarre of all are reports that Women Talking director Sarah Polley is to give us a live-action Bambi – complete, presumably, with the gory slaughter of Bambi’s mother.
Is there any indication Disney is rethinking the remakes? Yes and no. In early August, it was reported the increasingly beleaguered Iger had sensibly scrapped a planned Hunchback of Notre Dame update. But this was preceded by a report in July of a reboot that does seem likely to go ahead - a new version of, yes, John Carter.
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