The Official Trailer for Disney's Live Action 'Snow White' Just Arrived and it's Already Getting Ratioed All to Hell

Image Group LA. Getty Images.

If the last few weeks have proven anything, it's that reports of the death of the film industry were premature. Yes, Covid put movies on their death bed. The writer's strike had it in critical condition. And one bad decision after another almost had Disney/Marvel - the industry's biggest, most reliable cash cow - flat-lining. 

But there have been successes in recent years, to be sure. Top Gun: Maverick, Barbie, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 and Oppenheimer were critically and commercially popular. And then, before and after the holiday, both Wicked and Moana 2 have been playing to packed houses from coast to coast. Proving that there's not only an audience for popcorn movies in general, but family-friendly musicals in particular. People still want to drive to a theater and sit in a crowd, as long as they're being offered quality entertainment that doesn't lecture to them with some socio-political agenda. 

Which brings us to Disney's next big project, the live action Snow White, which has wallowed in production and public relations hell for years. Books are going to be written about this latest attempt by the Mouse to repurpose one of it's most beloved IPs for a modern audience. It's been plagued by one misstep after another. Beginning with the studio's perception that they couldn't have actual dwarfs in a story with seven dwarfs in the actual title:

So they released this photo teasing what they were going with instead:

Which promptly got destroyed by the online nerd mob, with variations of how Disney was making Snow White and the Seven People From a Portland Homeless Encampment. It was later announced the live actors would be swapped out for CGI characters. Apparently, Disney management decided ANY solution would be better than hiring actual dwarf actors and giving them a chance to make good money appearing in a major studio release.

There was also a self-inflicted PR catastrophe when the actress they cast as the title character proceeded to drop a big, steaming deuce on the source material. Which is not just a beloved classic that has been entertaining audiences for generations, it's the rock upon which Disney has built their castle:

In the midst of all this, a teaser trailer with the computer-generated dwarfs and a couple of song clips did not get the intended response from the audience:

IMDb - [D]espite Disney’s push to get audiences excited, the long list of controversies surrounding its main star and its production have soured like a bad apple.

As of the writing of this article, the like-to-dislike ratio on YouTube … is one million dislikes to only 79K likes, making the like-to-dislike ratio ten times more negative than positive.

More recently, Rachel Zegler stepped in it the old-fashioned Hollywood way: By diving into politics:

Suffice to say, when you're trying to market a movie that has had multiple reshoots, recasting, reimaginings, has gone back to the drawing board on several occasions, been delayed several times and gone way over budget, having your star drop F-bombs on the next president and tell more than half the country she hopes they get no peace is not exactly something your Marketing department would make the centerpiece of their ad campaign. 

And so we come to this. To today. To the big reveal of what all this time, effort, money, and putting out PR fires has produced. And whether it's been worth it:

Woof.

This is just one man's opinion, but my gut tells me this is going to be a disaster the likes of which few if any movie studios have ever encountered. Just another classic character turned into a lazy, cliched, rehashed, tiresome Girl Boss out of the fevered fantasies of a Film Studies major who minored in Gender Studies. A Mary Sue who's destined to achieve big things, take on the world, become a warrior princess, take up arms, triumph over evil and become the leader her people never knew they needed until she came along. While of course the prince is reduced to a supporting role, cheering her on. Just a slightly taller eighth dwarf. Yawn. 

But I don't think I'm alone in that opinion. In order to see the "dislikes" along with the "likes" on YouTube, you need some Google Chrome extension I'm not interested in. But according to the comments on the video, a couple of hours after it dropped it's got 19,000 dislikes to just 7,300 likes. And the first number continues to go up at a much faster rate than the second. Take a quick scroll through the more than 3,500 comments and I defy you to find more than a handful that aren't brutally destroying this thing. 

Obviously no one will know for sure until March 21st whether the final product is the shambles it appears to be. But just the fact it's not being released on a holiday or during summer movie season is a pretty good indicator the Powers That Be recognize they have no audience for this. Not when the star has admitted she hates the original almost as much as she hates a majority of the electorate. Besides, when you're trying to convince us a magic mirror would think Rachel Zegler is fairer than Gal Gadot, you've already made it hard for the customers to take you seriously. 

I guess this was a long way of saying Eric Cartman is right once again: