Disney Cancels Snow White London Premiere
Disney is very worried about Snow White. The live-action remake of their first animated film has gone through more controversy than entire studios see in a year (even these days), with reshoots following a disastrous leaked image of Disney’s replacement for the Seven Dwarfs costing plenty of money, particularly because of all the CGI necessary to insert some actual dwarfs. But even this problem is eclipsed by the film’s star, Rachel Zegler, who has spent seemingly every public appearance trying to get more people to hate her. She denigrated the original animated film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs; insulted her co-star, Andrew Burnap; sold the movie as a joyless lecture on feminism; smugly demanded she be paid residuals for a movie she didn’t write, direct, or produce; and topped it off by wishing ill will on over half of the country for their voting decision in November. Snow White has become the movie nobody wants to see, starring the smug, entitled prima donna everyone wishes would shut up and go away.
And you’d better believe this nightmare of a production is coming back to bite Disney where it sits. Snow White is tracking to make between $48 million and $58 million in its domestic opening weekend, which would be a disaster for a film that cost at least $273 million to make but could have set Disney back almost $500 million. In other words, this is going to be a bigger embarrassment for Disney than Captain America: Brave New World, which is struggling to get to $400 million worldwide after an opening weekend that was almost double what’s expected for Snow White. And Disney appears to know how much trouble this movie is in because they are attempting a quixotic gambit to salvage what they can. According to The Daily Mail, Disney will not have a London premiere for Snow White, which would normally take place at Leicester Square for a movie as big as this; instead, there will be “a ‘handful’ of tightly controlled press events” at which Rachel Zegler will get few questions. This is to “avoid anti-woke backlash,” in The Daily Mail’s words. Snow White is still expected to have a premiere in the United States, probably because not to do so would be too conspicuous – not that skipping a London premiere doesn’t look desperate.
The writing has been on the wall for this movie for some time now, and pretty much everyone not trying to shill for Disney has said that it’s almost certainly going to bomb. The trailer got a like-to-dislike ratio of 28,000 to 727,000, which is 96.29% dislikes. Everyone seemed to be pissed off by Rachel Zegler’s antics, particularly her denigration of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, one of the most beloved movies of all time and the film that built Disney into the Hollywood powerhouse it is today. Now, the numbers are being crunched, and Disney knows it’s got a disaster on its hands, and there isn’t much they can do to fix it anymore. This move makes a certain amount of sense, particularly the part where they try to keep Rachel Zegler under wraps for the publicity tour; they’re going to have to write this one off, mitigating the damage as best they can to keep their losses as low as possible. That means getting Rachel Zegler to stop saying things that alienate the audience, and the only way to do that is to keep her in controlled environments. A red carpet movie premiere allows for plenty of unscripted interviews where Zegler could say anything that pops into her head. But while I understand what Disney is doing, it’s too late for anything they try to make much of a difference; Zegler has taken an axe to Snow White’s ability to make money, and all they can do now is try to get past another big failure as quickly as possible.
Let us know what you think of Snow White skipping its London premiere in the comments!
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