‘Snow White’ Review: Well, At Least It's Better Than The 1989 Academy Awards
This potential unintentional camp classic is livelier and less dutifully dull than the likes of 'Beauty and the Beast' and 'The Little Mermaid'. But that's not saying much.
Snow White (2025)
109 minutes
rated PG for “violence, some peril, thematic elements and brief rude humor.”
Directed by Marc Webb
Written by Erin Cressida Wilson
Produced by Marc Platt and Jared LeBoff
Starring Rachel Zegler, Gal Gadot, Andrew Burnap, Ansu Kabia, Patrick Page, Hadley Fraser, Lorena Andrea, Andrew Barth Feldman, Tituss Burgess, Martin Klebba, Jason Kravits, George Salazar, Jeremy Swift and Andy Grotelueschen
Cinematography by Mandy Walker
Edited by Mark Sanger and Sarah Broshar
Composed by Jeff Morrow
Existing songs courtesy of Larry Morey and Frank Churchill
New songs courtesy of Benj Pasek and Justin Paul
Opening the week of March 21, courtesy of the Walt Disney Company
Snow White is another try-hard live-action remake of a Disney animated classic that both lionizes and apologizes for the elements securing its generational status. Yes, it focuses less on artistic intent and more on Disney’s ambition to claim both the definitive animated and live-action adaptations of an otherwise frequently adapted source material. Yes, it’s tonally skewed, often unintentionally funny, with attempts to replicate the original film’s dwarfs resulting in some hellish purgatory between man and monster, and it features more than a few awful new songs that exist primarily for streaming glory and Oscar consideration. However, some of the aspects that make Snow White bad also make it more fun and less tedious than other recent Disney remakes.
In a healthy, varied theatrical industry where the fate of the exhibition ecosystem didn’t periodically rely on the extent to which Disney’s various brand-focused releases performed akin to their 2010s output, Snow White could simply be a colorful absurdity, just another entry in a long line of (Disney or otherwise) disappointing live-action adaptations of Snow White. It could exist as a mediocre yet harmless trifle, impacting business and culture no more than 102 Dalmatians or the Tim Allen/Robert Downey Jr. remake of The Shaggy Dog that you probably forgot about until just now. In a rational world, within a sane culture featuring a robust exhibition ecosystem, Disney’s big-budget live-action remake of Snow White would be both culturally insignificant and artistically harmless.
So, let’s pretend that Snow White is just a live-action remake of a Disney animated film. It’s a picture perhaps with the budget and ambitions of Oz: The Great and Powerful, arriving three years after Alice in Wonderland, but whose success or failure means little to the world. Let’s pretend that every damn tentpole does not become an all-consuming part of the culture wars. Let’s ignore that online trolls so poison the well with bad-faith discourse rooted in racism and sexism that even those who might argue these films signify the death of cinema feel compelled to offer a token defense. Even in that glorious… sunavabith… Tomorrowland… Snow White wouldn’t pass muster. It would still fall short compared to its cinematic predecessors.