The Critical Drinker Takes Apart “Snow White,” And You’ve Got To See It
The movie won’t be out for a few months, but if what’s below is any indication of the reception it’s going to get – and we’d bet the farm that it absolutely is – you can chalk up the rebooted “Snow White” as Disney’s next massive box-office flop.
Which wouldn’t be a surprise. The eight Disney features before the current fifth installment of the Indiana Jones series, which is likely going to lose in the neighborhood of $200 million when it’s all said and done, lost the company nearly $900 million, and let’s face it – casting an actress of Colombian descent to play a character derived from German folklore whose name literally suggests fair-complected skin is a wide-open signal of anti-European cultural appropriation that audiences have proven they’ve got miniscule appetites for.
Disney is now one of the five least-trusted brands in corporate America. The ongoing box office train wreck (which interestingly enough could have been halted if they’d just released “Sound of Freedom,” which they had in their archives for five years) is only one of their problems – they’ve laid off almost half of ESPN’s on-air talent thanks to the hemorrhaging of the sports network’s bottom line thanks to cord-cutting and cable subscription losses, their theme parks are having the worst summer since the Great Recession, the Disney Plus streaming service has lost them a cool $10 billion to date and former-turned-current CEO Bob Iger is now openly discussing the sale of Disney’s cable and broadcast TV properties – ABC, ESPN, FX, FreeForm and National Geographic among them. They’re a third of Disney’s business and Iger calls the channels “non-core.”
This is a company which has utterly lost its way and it can’t survive. A hostile takeover is coming – either that or outright corporate bankruptcy. The only way to avoid the crash is a complete housecleaning and rebranding back to the wholesome, pro-traditional American identity which built the company, and it might even be too late for that.
Add to the above the fact that there are now both a writers’ strike and an actors’ strike to paralyze Hollywood, and there is no opportunity to create new properties to reverse the slide – not that current management is capable of greenlighting anything audiences will positively respond to – and the course is irrevocably set for the foreseeable future. Disney will bleed until it either dies altogether or someone snaps it up and fires virtually everybody.
Of course, the Critical Drinker is one of our favorite cultural commentators, and the evisceration he lays down on what we know about this bastardization of the Snow White franchise is one for the books. We think you’ll enjoy it, so here it is.
