Actress Rachel Zegler coordinated with struggling outlet Buzzfeed during a recent a interview, to drop hints about the upcoming live action Disney remake of Snow White.
Full stop – it’s going to suck.
RELATED: Disney And Marvel Bank On Identity Politics In First Teaser For Ms. Marvel Disney Plus Series
Disney’s past attempts at leveraging classic franchises into live action remakes hasn’t worked out nearly as well as they had hoped. For a company like Disney, which sits upon a treasure trove of material, this is pretty pathetic. The MCU is withering on the vine, Star Wars is a running joke at this point, and remakes of classic Disney properties are being passed over in favor of the original classics.
That’s because people prefer the genuine article, instead of a shameless cash grab masquerading as a culturally relevant art piece.
Consider 2019’s live-action Aladdin remake, which managed to rake in $1 billion at the box office, and weigh it against 1992’s animated Disney original, which grossed around half of that. Adjusted for inflation, the 1992 film would have made about $958.6 million dollars today. That tally comes in just shy of the live action remake, but there’s a catch.
The 1992 animated version was released in just 6 markets – the USA, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Australia. By contrast, the 2019 remake hit an eye-watering 54 markets, including China, where it took just $53 million. This is not the kind of performance that Disney would, or should have hoped for.
Certain live action remakes from Disney have done alright, including Emma Watson’s Beauty and the Beast, and the Lion King, though the latter got savaged by critics. However, other films like Cruella, Dumbo, Cinderella and Alice Through the Looking Glass failed to meet even half of their success. Worse, Disney’s focus on corporate wokeness and forced diversity is making things a lot harder.
Rachel Zegler is currently making headlines for all the wrong reasons, thanks to Steven Spielberg’s wholly unnecessary remake of West Side Story going over like a lead balloon at the box office. Spielberg and the cast used racial instigation to whip up resentment leading to its release, and fans responded in kind, by dismissing it with a roll of their eyes.
Even the coveted Latino/Latina demographic, which was obviously the target for this film, have tuned out, and aren’t the least bit interested. Could it be because Spielberg opted to patronize them out of the gate, while tossing around offensive terms like “Latinx,” which they are not particularly fond of in the first place?
Now, Disney is going to repeat the same process, with Zegler, a known instigator who attacks both her fan base, as well as fellow actors. And she’s going on the offensive once more. She’s not a particularly nice, or palatable human being, and her rhetoric mimics her chronic immaturity and toxic personality, yet she’s in the lead for Snow White, a story about a girl who is her exact behavioral opposite.
She recently stepped on another rake when she attacked Americans for their dislike over Spielberg’s decision to omit subtitles from Spanish-speaking scenes in West Side Story. “It is respect!” she shouted. “It is respect for my upbringing in a Spanish-speaking household. It is a respect for the fact that this nation does not have an official language.”
Unfortunately, nobody taught Zegler basic history about the Founding Fathers, who believed that an official language in a cultural melting pot like America would end up being a divisive issue. Once again, the Founders demonstrated more “progressivism” than the so-called “Progressive Left.”
The decision to cast a non-white actress in the role of a Caucasian lead is nothing new, but that’s the point, and Zegler is waiting in the wings to pounce on the backlash. This is, of course, how the Left operate. They do something they know will cause resentment, on purpose, simply to reaffirm their own distorted conclusions of reality.
It is worth analyzing what cultural Leftist zealots like Zegler would do, if Disney decided to cast a Caucasian actress as Tiana in a live action adaptation of say, the excellent 2009 animated film The Princess and the Frog. Of course, that would never happen, because race and gender swapping always moves in one direction, one-hundred percent of the time.
What’s even more ironic is that vast swathes of white moviegoers wouldn’t want such a racial flip, in the first place. It’s hard to think of anyone, regardless of their race, who would be interested in seeing a white Blade. Similarly, the Left think it’s totally Okay to cast a black actress as Anne Boleyn in a historical piece, but would we ever see a Color Purple remake with an all-white cast?
No, nor would anyone want that. Coincidentally, this is also why most people don’t have a huge issue with Miles Morales as Spider-Man, specifically because he’s not Peter Parker. He’s a new character that might be piggybacking on the original in terms of recognition, but that’s largely where the comparison ends.
For anyone who thinks race-swapping was a factor in certain fans disliking the Morales character, we have two words – Ben Reilly.
As for Zegler’s specific comments on Snow White, she told BuzzFeed, “There’s not much I can say about it besides the fact that Snow White has constantly been criticized — even though she’s the original Disney princess and we love her so much — but criticized for existing solely for a prince, existing solely to be rescued. ”
She went on to reveal that her version of the character would be “stronger,” saying, “And I think that our director, Marc Webb, and everyone who’s working on this film has really taken her narrative and turned it into something that’s a lot stronger. And I’m very, very excited to be able to bring that to life.”
It is codespeak for a radical third wave feminist agenda infiltrating classic properties, in an attempt to push a female empowerment narrative. The problem is that there are inexhaustible ways of showcasing strong female leads that do not alienate the moviegoing populace in the process.
Snow White is not one of them. It’s a classic tale, and fans have expectations going in that they do not wish to be subverted.
The entire concept of the film revolves around a traditional romance story with a beautiful and kind-hearted female lead, and a chivalrous gentleman. Upon last check, neither of these two archetypes are exclusive to a specific skin color. Neither are all women kind, nor all men chivalrous, but those are typically the societal gender standards that make for a happy culture.
Arguments can be made about objective standards of beauty in culture and society, but that’s not the point of the story, nor does the story itself require a white protagonist. Any female of any other racial group could have been Snow White.
In this case, however, Snow White is actually white, as the source material indicates.
This attempt to break down barriers of gender, sexuality and race by beating everyone over the head with a tyrannical hammer is quickly losing steam. The Eternals was Disney’s latest attempt to prioritize identity groups and intersectionality over character development, or a story, and everyone tuned out.
The same thing is happening on Disney+, with woke failures like Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and bait/switch shows like Hawkeye.
RELATED: Hawkeye Reportedly Worst Performing Marvel Series On Disney+
It’s also worth noting that the Left’s stubborn insistence on pushing the term “Latinx” is absolutely astonishing. According to a ThinkNow study in 2019, a whopping 98% of Latino folks hate being called “Latinx,” and would prefer to be called Hispanic, or Latino/Latina. That figure is backed up by figures from both Gallup, and Pew Research.
This is a symptom of a much broader and larger problem on the Left – namely, the insistence on being racist, in order to combat racism. It’s head-scratching on a good day, and both vulgar and offensive on a bad one. This is part and parcel of the broader Leftist narrative being pushed by radicals within the Democratic Party, to restructure everything based on “equity.”
To get there, the Left make some pretty bold claims, such as failing President Joe Biden saying that African Americans and Hispanics were too stupid to know how to use the internet, find a voting booth, or hire a lawyer or an accountant. It mirrors the Critical Race Theory garbage of proponents like Derrick Bell, Ibram Kendi and Robin DiAngelo, who claim that non-whites hold absolutely no governance over themselves.
It’s also why the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture put out an infographic claiming that the concepts of hard work, self-reliance, punctuality and personal responsibility were symptoms of “white culture.” What this inevitably leads to are a group of predominantly white elitists with a white savior complex.
Which is, in fact, racist. By the way, 80% of Disney’s current board of directors is white. Just saying.
On the female empowerment side, it is a constant source of amusement to see the Left attempt to emasculate every single male in the country, to the detriment of everything from our law enforcement, to our national security, while simultaneously making movies like Terminator: Dark Fate, featuring a 5’1″ actress as the world’s savior, despite looking like she’s going to fall over backwards while holding a gun almost as large as she is.
The natural repercussions of this rhetoric are starting to play out, with men increasingly less likely to aid a female in need, such as an incident that occurred in Philadelphia when a woman was raped on a subway train, while the other passengers refused to help. When cultures start indoctrinating men not to protect women, they clear the road for men who will victimize women, every time.
RELATED: Wokeness, Or Superhero Fatigue – What Exactly Is Killing The MCU?
So, why do Leftists in positions of power like Disney keep pushing this rhetoric, and losing customers as a result? Because the narrative must be maintained, at all costs, in order to push a dystopian view of the future that the Left think is a pathway to paradise. It hasn’t worked for gender relations, race relations, the economy, foreign policy, or law and order, but it doesn’t matter. The struggle is the goal.
The super-majority of the population in this country are neither racist, nor do they view a person’s immutable characteristics as a political football that can be thrown about for the sake of grabbing power, and it’s something Democrats are learning the hard way as we stand less than a year out from the midterms.
There are always going to be men and women who will defy what an intolerant Leftist establishment says about how they should think, and act in today’s society. It’s worth mentioning that this same Left cannot even describe what a female is, when asked directly. Only when it serves an agenda are women suddenly dug out of mothballs, and used as a prop to push a narrative. Afterwards, it’s “chest-feeders” and “birthing persons” all day long.
The question remains as to whether Americans will turn out in droves to see an adaptation of Snow White, played by a non-white Latina female actress with a third-wave feminist mindset, and radical racial views. This formula hasn’t exactly been paying dividends, of late. The race and gender swapping by Hollywood needs to stop, primarily because it’s very, very racist to do so, regardless of the character.
Or, they can sit back and wonder why Spider-Man: No Way Home killed it at the box office, while their woke-prioritized side projects struggled to make back their budgets. The question is, how much money needs to be lost before the delusion comes to an end?
NEXT: Disney+ Only Adds 2 Million New Subscribers, Average Monthly Revenue Falls