Disney’s most recent live action production, Snow White, was released on March 21, 2025, and has stirred up lots of controversy. Most notoriously, the film is disliked for its casting decisions, with some mocking Rachel Zegler’s (Snow White) attitude toward the character herself. Others forms of criticism are more political, calling out the Evil Queen’s actress, Gal Gadot, for her affiliation with the Israeli Defence Force and role in the promotion of pro-Israel propaganda. Rather notably, Variety reports that Lebanon has banned the film’s release due to the recent Israeli attacks on the country.
Regardless of political or personal opinion however, the movie is still receiving bad reviews. Rotten Tomatoes holds an overall rating of 40% for the film, IMDb rates the film a 1.6/10 and Metacritic rates the film as a 50%. Profit wise, Snow White has not been successful either. A recent Business Insider article compares the whopping $270 million budget to the $143 million in sales. This profit deficit falls into pattern with many other, more recent live action remakes, mostly produced by Disney.
Having seen the movie in theaters myself, I can confidently say that the negative reviews are not entirely flukes. Similar to the underperforming live action adaptation of Mulan, Snow White did not follow the storyline of its cartoon counterpart (Spoilers Ahead). While the young princess is cast out of her kingdom by her evil-queen stepmother, this adaptation involves Snow White enlisting the help of rebel thieves and starting a revolution-of-sorts against her stepmother. The knight in shining armor is no prince, but instead a flannel-wearing thief who promises to help the princess find her father. Good eventually triumphs over evil as Snow White gives a monologue that scares the Evil Queen into running away, where she finds herself absorbed into the infamous magical mirror. Overall, I would say the plot alterations subtract from the story’s original charm. Part of what makes seeing a live action remake so compelling is that viewers get to watch a new version of a film they already love. By changing so much about the storyline, the remake becomes disconnected from the original. Had the contrasting interpretations been initially advertised, lots of distaste could have been avoided.
That being said, my most prominent criticism stems from the costuming and design of the film. The CGI animations of both the animals and dwarfs were executed incredibly poorly. Had I not known they were in fact CGI, I would have believed them to be made purely through artificial intelligence prompting. The quality of such animations were comparable to AI images that every facebook-savvy grandparent would believe to be real. Personally, my confusion stems from questioning why anyone would want their incredibly complex and time consuming animations to appear as something that could be easily made on any AI image generator. Similarly, the costuming budget of Snow White presents itself to be much less than it truly is. For a story set sometime around the 16th century, the fully and iridescently sequined dress worn by the Evil Queen is very out-of-place. As mentioned before, Snow White’s thieving love interest does in fact wear a flannel button-up, and during the ending’s celebratory dance, multiple modern day outfits can be caught as they unsuccessfully try to camouflage themselves into a more medieval-looking flash mob. These anachronisms were painfully obvious in just one viewing of the film, leaving me to wonder just how many other things I missed. That being said, I doubt I will rewatch this film to discover more. For anyone planning to see this new Snow White, my advice would be to hold an open mind and to not expect any hard-hitting childhood nostalgia.
