The Unbearable Wokeness of Disney?
Did the socio-political content of Snow White really impact its box office?
As I’m writing this, Marc Webb’s Snow White – the latest in Disney’s intermittently successful series of live-action remakes of the studio’s animated classics – is ending its second weekend in theaters worldwide, with a box office tally still far below the required threshold for success (for a more detailed analysis of what’s going on with that movie’s commercial prospects, I recommend you check out the work of my fellow Substacker Scott Mendelson).
In addition to doing poorly at the box office, the movie has been viciously attacked in various corners of the Internet, most notably IMDb: as is now par for the course ever since the site became an Amazon subsidiary and thus susceptible to a much larger influx of user comments, it’s been review-bombed to the point of having an average of 1.5 out of 10 (a detail that prompted the site itself to highlight “unusual voting activity” in its breakdown). That it’s a manipulated score is obvious when comparing it to Letterboxd, whose users are people who actually watch movies before rating them: over there, as befits a divisive film, the average is currently 2.1 out of 5.
Quite a few loud voices online have celebrated the film’s failure with the motto “Go woke, go broke”, seemingly indicating that any movie which doesn’t explicitly cater to straight white men (the right’s distorted definition of “woke”, a word that actually indicates awareness of social injustice) is destined to fail. One wonders what those same people will say at the end of the year when the third installment of Avatar – a franchise that deals with environmentalism and anti-colonialism, and depicts greedy humans as the antagonists – smashes box office records once again. Or how they feel about their motto failing to stop Barbie – a movie where the enemy is literally the patriarchy – from becoming the highest grossing film of 2023.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg: despite what this section of the online community would like to think, socially progressive movies have always been popular, and still are. If we limit ourselves to genre cinema, the prime example of filmmakers using movies to convey important messages mixed with spectacle and entertainment, recent examples of successful “woke” titles include the Star Wars sequel trilogy, the Planet of the Apes reboot, the first Aquaman film and the Purge franchise. Jordan Peele, whose directorial debut Get Out was a massive hit and openly dealt with racism, has gone on the record saying he’s unlikely to ever cast white actors in leading roles in his films, but audiences still flocked to see Us and Nope.
And if we’re to talk about Disney specifically, their animated output has been socially conscious for at least three decades, particularly when it comes to the depiction of other cultures: for Pocahontas, aside from some of the singing voices, all the Powhatans were played by Indigenous actors. This aim for accuracy became the standard for all Disney Animation projects going forward, long before other studios were put on the spot for their casting practices in the wake of George Floyd’s murder.
On the remake front, an obvious rebuke to the claim Snow White is failing because of its message comes in the form of Aladdin, which grossed one billion worldwide and, in fact, drew criticism for its decision to add an original Caucasian character – a bumbling prince from an unspecified Nordic country – who stuck out like a sore thumb (adding insult to injury, said character was at one point supposed to get his own Disney+ spin-off).
More recently, Mufasa: The Lion King, where the villain is a white lion voiced by Mads Mikkelsen (the sole Caucasian actor playing a lion in the film), grossed over 700 million dollars. Granted, you never see the performers’ faces in Mufasa, but beyond the usual chatter about these films not really needing to exist, there was no outcry over casting practices like there was for Snow White or The Little Mermaid (the latter was also review-bombed, but ended up doing decently in theaters).
So, what happened to the latest live-action remake? Despite the animated original’s iconic status as the first ever feature-length Disney production, Snow White has never had the cultural shelf life of more popular fare like the Disney Renaissance titles, which also happen to be the films whose remakes have done overwhelmingly well in cinemas. Other eras of the studio’s output have been more uneven commercially, which at one point led to an informal policy of sending most of the pre-Renaissance reimaginings to Disney+. Case in point: based on reactions to the marketing, both online and in theaters, it stands to reason the next remake, Lilo & Stitch, won’t suffer the same fate, mainly because, unlike the 2025 dwarfs, the CGI version of Stitch doesn’t look like he was regurgitated from the deepest pits of digital hell…