The Four Color Media Monitor

The box office results are in, and as John Nolte at Breitbart stated, Snow Woke's opened to just $43 million:

With its dreadful $43 million opening, Snow White now holds the record for the lowest debut weekend of any of Disney’s live-action remakes.

The previous record-holder was 2019’s Dumbo, which opened to $46 million.

This does not count the 29-year-old live-action remake of 101 Dalmatians, which is not part of this current cycle. Nevertheless, that 1996 movie still opened to $33.5 million. In today’s dollars, that would be $68 million.

Hell, if you account for inflation, Dumbo (2019) opened to $57 million in today’s dollars, which tells you just how poorly Snow Woke has been received.

The news isn’t any better for Snow Woke overseas. Previous projections for this weekend’s global haul hovered around an already pathetic $100 million. By Monday, that number will sit at around $87 million.

As Nolte also notes, the film's already received below 50 percent at Rotten Tomatoes (43 percent last time I looked), and there's already over 200 reviews posted, so that too doesn't bode well for whatever legacy they were hoping this would achieve as a remake where the princess allegedly becomes a rebel leader along with a friendly bandit. I looked over some of the articles about this latest Disney disaster, and Ynet says the critics appear to favor Zegler over Gadot:

Some critics didn’t hold back when it came to Gadot's performance. On the website DiscussingFilm, the reviewer praised Rachel Zegler, who stars alongside Gadot as Snow White, but didn’t hesitate to harshly criticize the Israeli star.

"Rachel Zegler’s endless charisma convincingly positions Snow White as a strong, pure-of-heart leader even when the script isn’t pulling the same weight," it said. "The titular princess simply pops from the screen, especially when Zegler is allowed to put her stamp on the original film’s iconography. The same cannot be said for Gal Gadot, who turns in what might be her worst performance to date. Gadot is woefully miscast as the Evil Queen, unable to sell us on the glamor, fierceness or true camp of a classic Disney villain."

While it wouldn't surprise me if Gadot did fail to deliver (and that wimple-style outfit she wears is hideous, with one promo picture making her look repellently masculine), I've got a feeling many of the positive takes on Zegler were deliberate, mainly because I saw some promo footage from Snow White already where she does musical numbers like "Wishing While You Work", and Zegler's voice was dismayingly rough, and not very feminine, in contrast to the original cartoon's voices. It sure sounds like some critics were working overtime to play up Zegler at Gadot's expense. If you really think Gadot's performance was dreadful and the material beneath her, so be it, but don't let Zegler off over potential political biases. That does no good, and only makes it look like the critics are siding with Zegler based on her far-left politics that she could've kept quiet about all this time. And if she had, it might've at least minimized the damage that's already manifested.

I read the review from Film Threat, which was less biased than some other reviews when it comes to Gadot/Zegler, and let's see what they say about the CGI dwarves:

When the villagers are left to starve alone, Snow White shows compassion to her people, notably a thief named Jonathan (Andrew Byrnap). Her kindness makes her the fairest of them all. This news causes the Evil Queen (Gal Gadot) to plan Snow White’s assassination, which leads her into the haunted forest and to the doorsteps of seven lonely and creepy dwarves. Can Snow White step up as the leader her father wanted her to be and defeat the Evil Queen through love, compassion, and empathy?

[...] Now, let’s talk about the dwarves. They are creepy as hell as these weird-looking human-esque characters. Here’s the thing. Everything the dwarves do in the film could have been done by actual human beings, actual little people. So why make them these CGI monstrosities?

Lastly, can’t we have love stories in Disney films anymore? Disney’s Snow White takes a hard 180 when concerning “One Day My Prince Will Come.” There are sparks between Snow White and Jonathan for the sole purpose of awakening the princess from her spell and (spoiler alert) then nothing. Webb and co. chose a girl to become a strong leader at the expense of falling in love. Why is romance now forbidden in children’s movies? Let’s be clear: Snow White and Jonathan will never live happily ever after.

One review I read recently may have said Snow White does kiss the bandit hero, but it clearly doesn't salvage the alarming mess, another product of Disney's supremely silly notion they just have to turn every previous cartoon into a live action adaptation. Here's more on the dwarves from the NY Post's review:

The worst thing about “Snow White,” unbelievably, are the dwarfs. The dwarfs!

In an out-of-their-mind choice, Disney has animated the septet of miners into creepy lawn gnomes. Ostensibly people, the guys look more fake than the smiling squirrels and birds in the forest.

The filmmakers obviously had no clue how to handle Snow’s cottage pals, so they took the most off-putting path possible. And their jokes are never funny.

Over the past decade, comedy's been so badly mangled as an art, with horror themes given more of an emphasis, that it should be no wonder this could get fouled up so badly. Of course, when you have a film project hampered by a star whose politics are so vicious it makes her presence otherwise alienating, what else can you expect? Also, as per this review on Age of the Geek, there's another problem:

The best thing that can be said for this current live-action version of “Snow White” which includes extensive CGI (e.g. all the dwarves), is that somewhere in Los Angeles or New York or Chicago, there are scenes that will be a treasure trove for drag queens and fans of campy parodies at small equity-waiver theaters. When that happens in Los Angeles, please invite me. In “Snow White,” the mix of CGI animals and humanoids doesn’t work, the production and costume design color scheme is often unbalanced and the new songs aren’t particularly memorable.

Oh my god, this makes the whole matter even creepier. But then, as I noted before, one of the promo pics makes Gadot look horrifically and bizarrely masculine. One more reason this live action remake won't age well.

All that aside, if the following news from JNS says anything, it's that Zegler did Gadot a horrible disfavor:

Israeli actress Gal Gadot has been given extra security because of her outspoken support for Israel, according to a new report Tuesday.

The 39-year-old actress, who served in the Israel Defense Forces before her Hollywood career, received a “spike” of death threats after her “Snow White” co-star Rachel Zegler, 23, shared a pro-Palestinian message on social media, according to Variety.

Disney was forced to heighten security for the Wonder Woman star after Zegler stunned her boses by posting “and always remember, free palestine” in a thread on X about the $270 million remake of the 1937 animated classic.

Well. One can reasonably wonder if Zegler did it all deliberately out of spite for her co-star. Exactly why this film deserves its failure. John Nolte also addressed the topic:

“Insiders” claim Disney was furious when Zegler added “and always remember, free Palestine” to an X post thanking fans for 120 million views on a Snow White teaser trailer.

Afterwards, Snow White’s “producer Marc Platt flew to New York to speak directly with her,” the report explains, before dropping this nuke on the mouthy little oompa loompa: “But the actress, whose relationship with the studio began to unravel in 2022 during a contentious West Side Story awards season campaign and continued as she trashed the beloved original Snow White stood her ground, and the post remained.” [emphasis added]

You see what they did there? They are telling the entire entertainment industry that Zegler didn’t just make a couple of youthful mistakes on Snow White. No, no, no, no… They are telling everyone she’s difficult, impossible, and not worth doing business with. The Hollywood term for [t]his is “assholing your way out of the industry” and Disney wants everyone to know Rachel Zegler is an asshole.

Wait it gets worse, and by “worse,” I mean even more glorious… After Zegler went all “free Palestine,” “death threats toward Zegler’s co-star Gal Gadot, who is Israeli, spiked, and Disney had to pay for additional security for the mother of four.”

They’re blaming Zegler for death threats. Death threats!

[...] Far be it for me to defend this smug little harridan, but the biggest reason Snow White tanked, which the sycophants at Penske Media’s Variety barely touch, is that the movie sucks. Snow White freaken sucks. Did Rachel Zegler whip up a backlash? Sure. Is she responsible for Snow White sucking like nothing ever sucked in the history of suck? No, she’s not. It was Disney’s idea to woke-rape the original into a stupid feminist story that made no sense and had no heart. It was Disney’s idea to CGI the dwarfs into dull garden gnomes. It was Disney’s idea to spend a fortune on CGI that looks like something posted on MySpace in 1998.

[...] P.S. I stand by my review that Gal Gadot was the only bright spot in the movie. The sycophant critics all praised Zegler and trashed Gadot when the opposite was true. There is nothing behind Zegler’s eyes, and she turns every song up to bombast. Gadot understood she was doing camp and created an Evil Queen who relished being evil. She’s terrific.

If that's how he feels, so be it, but, considering all the issues involved, it'd still be ill-advised to waste money on this dud. Newsbusters also weighed in with the following:

As expected, Snow White’s remake and its lecturing leading lady's career blew up like a Hezbollah pager this week.

It turns out, nobody wants to line up to be yelled at by a princess-turned two-dimensional boss lady whose kingdom of comrades waged a cultural revolution on their childhood classics.

Will our self-appointed entertainment overlords get a clue when they take a look at their movie’s whopping IMDB rating of 1.3 out of 10 this week? Or when their wallets suddenly feel light after losing millions?

Of course not.

Unfortunately, they have a point. It could be ages before they get a clue, and start discarding their ultra-leftist agendas to make serious entertainment again. For now, with all that's been told, and what's come about, this live action remake of a cartoon classic deserves all the failure it gets, and if Zegler never gets another film project again, it'll be richly deserved. She has lectured everybody way too much, caused so much PR embarrassment, that to continue employment for her would only make a horrible joke out of their business practices. As for Gadot, she does have more projects in the pipeline, but if she continues participation in what could be woke-laced productions, as even the Cleopatra film project may turn out to be, she may eventually find her career washed up for good reason. At least then, she'd be able to campaign for Israel more often, and maybe other decent people in different countries as well. But for now, it remains to be seen if Gadot will choose her projects and co-stars more wisely. Based on her own leftism, it's uncertain she will.

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