Rachel Zegler and Gal Gadot's live-action Snow White teaser is here, and yeesh, those dwarfs
Disney's latest live-action remake of an animated classic has Rachel Zegler and Gal Gadot in decent cosplay, at least
Screenshot: YouTube/DisneyWe’re still working our way through the hangover from Disney’s big Friday night D23 Entertainment Showcase last night, when the Mouse House unleashed upon the internet everything they held back at Comic-Con last month. (You can read our more full coverage of the panel here, although it tragically doesn’t contain any clips of that Daredevil: Born Again footage showed to attendees in the room last night, because Disney hates us, personally, and doesn’t want us to feel joy.) What we do have is a trailer for the latest of Disney’s apparently endless efforts to reboot its entire classic animated film catalog in live action: The Rachel Zegler and Gal Gadot-starring Snow White.
As with every modern “teaser,” the promo video leaves pretty much nothing to the imagination: We get plenty of looks at Zegler and Gadot both, in what do appear to be very well-made cosplay costumes of the classic characters. All of the basic plot beats—evil queen, magic mirror, bad apple—are clearly intact, with no indication that director Mark Webb and screenwriters Greta Gerwig and Erin Cressida Wilson are looking to mess with nearly century-old canon (despite Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs being, when you strip away the music and the revolutionary animation, basically a story about a woman eventually getting over a bad case of food poisoning through no actions of her own). But, uh: Can we talk about these dwarfs?
We don’t see a lot of the characters who used to get co-billing with Snow in the film’s title in the teaser, but what we do makes it clear that they’re largely CGI creations, with cartoonish animated features imposed atop little person actors. That stands in stark contrast to the treatment given to Zegler (even though, we’d argue, Snow White in the original movie is just as much a caricature of the human form as the Dwarfs were), and we can’t help but think that feels kind of weird? It doesn’t help that, like many of the CGI effects in these live-action Disney remakes, the effects themselves have a waxiness that’s deeply unsettling.
Anyway, we’re sure we’ll eat our words when this make a billion bucks at the box office when it arrives in theaters; it’s currently aimed at a March 21, 2025 release date.