After years of delays, numerous controversies, and hundreds of angry YouTube videos from Disney adults, militant anti-wokesters, and both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Disney’s Snow White remake finally hit theaters this week.
I’m writing this before I see the movie, which throughout its long process seems among the most cursed big Hollywood projects of all time. Due mostly to its status as an unnecessary live-action remake of a Disney classic, I’m not super-confident that it’s going to be any good. It also seems like it’s coming at the tail end of another era, for Disney and movies in general, when the solution at all times was to just remake another classic.
But I will say this: A lot of people seem to be very mad at the film’s two lead actresses, and I can’t for the life of me figure out what it is that they did wrong.
See this Variety piece, which mentions the “Rachel Zegler and Gal Gadot Controversies.”
Read the replies or quote-tweets to that, and you’re likely to find two different flavors of reply: People minimizing Gadot’s “controversies” and emphasizing Zegler’s, and the opposite.
Confusing Backlash
Still, I think the main reasons people are mad at the two of them are that they disagree with each actress’ stance on Israel/Palestine — Gadot is a “Zionist” or “IDF murderer,” while Zegler is a “Hamas supporter” — and some version of “I just find her annoying,” “I don’t like her face/voice,” and “she reminds me of people I didn’t like in high school.” And sure, Zegler said mean stuff about Trump, and called the old version of Snow White “retrograde,” but of course it is, it’s a 90-year-old movie.
And sure, Gadot did that annoying “Imagine” video ― but that was five years ago.
Jonathan Majors also has a new movie out this week, was convicted in a court of law of doing something exponentially worse than anything anyone associated with Snow White did, and he seems to be getting a more sympathetic airing in the media than either Gadot or Zegler was. But his YouTube results don’t look like this:
I’m not sure why these are things that cause people to root for the failure of a movie, or to post hours-long videos about how much they hate a performer who they don’t know and have never met.
And it gets even more sexist than that ― a big, big chunk of the angry posting about Gadot and Zegler, and not only from men, is some version of calling one of them beautiful and the other ugly, thanks to the magic of side-by-side photos in which one is a bit more unflattering than usual.
I’m honestly rooting for the movie to clean up at the box office, and there’s a good chance it will. Because the film’s target audience is… little girls, who don’t give a hoot about any of the above.
