Disney’s Snow White Remake Draws Criticism Across Spectrum

Disney’s live-action remake of Snow White has drawn criticism across the spectrum online and in mainstream media for its casting of Rachel Zegler as Snow White, computer-generated imagery (CGI), and poor early box office numbers.

‘Feminist Rant’: Don Feder of The Washington Times (Lean Right bias) said Disney turned the 1937 classic film into “a feminist rant” and that Zegler “spouts the most awful drivel” to the press about the film’s feminist themes. Feder highlighted what he deems the “toxic dogma” of feminism, citing statistics around “isolation, plummeting birth rates, and children set adrift” and added, “Movies reflect the culture.”

‘Lefty Infighting’: Alison Willmore of New York Magazine (Left) argued Zegler was “set up” to fail by Disney and that the film is a paradigm for “lefty infighting.” Willmore described Snow White as “an institutionalist… pining for the idealized era of Obama’s/her father’s leadership.” “It’s a tale as old as time,” added Willmore “A sheltered Ivy League girl meets a rakish dirtbag leftist who lives with a bunch of roommates and who radicalizes her by negging her about her privilege.” Willmore concluded that the movie is a “joke” and described Disney as “a corporation that has for years been lumbering after its idea of the Zeitgeist with all the agility of an aging colossus.”

Watered Down, Twice: Poppy Sowerby of UnHerd (Center) compared Disney’s live-action to its adaptation of the original Snow White fairytale published by the German Brothers Grimm in 1812 into the classic animated film in 1937. Sowerby wrote that in the 1930s, Disney removed the original tale’s “more gruesome and confusing elements” to better fit “the contemporary moral mold of antebellum America.” Of the 2025 version, she claimed it was a “similar process” that involved “shoehorning modern manners into this unruly fairy tale.”

Positive Review: Owen Gleiberman of Variety (Left) argued that “the controversies are bupkis,” and the film is “more frolicsome and less lead-footed than most of the Disney cartoon remakes, with just enough of a love story to get by.” Gleiberman said the surrounding controversies exist “in a rare moment of ideological combustibility… from both sides of the cultural-politics spectrum,” and that Disney making Snow White “this pointedly political” was a surprise.

Written by the AllSides staff (of humans). Learn more. Support our mission.