"When Did Disney Get So Woke?!" pt. 2 Disney vs the 21st Century

 

In the first half of this series, we looked at this construction of the Disney image that the company has sold itself on for several decades now. Walt himself saw the purpose of his entertainment enterprise as depiction a happier world than that which he and the audience emerged from, and that formed the basis of his formidable fanbase. But because the larger culture only knows how to discuss these things in the context of consumerism, a lot of intricacies get obscured in the conversation about The Walt Disney Company, its interaction with larger culture, and the people who happily participate in this fandom. 

Basically, critics spent something like fifty years daring The Walt Disney Company to start being more proactive in how they participated in the multi-culture. And when Disney finally showed up in court to prove its case, the world just did not know what to do ...

The 21st Century

         With the development of the internet, you have the introduction of things like online forums. There is an unprecedented ability to discuss wider media and the “messages” they impart onto the wider population. Half of meme culture is just screenshotting mic drops from television or film with some caption about “this is important!”

    Hollywood has always tried to drink from both conservative and liberal fountains, but as the rising generation started expressing liberal attitudes, they started to feel a special incentive to make sure the left-leaning crowd saw themselves in the media.

The Great Dictator (1940)

The question of whether or not movies themselves can ever function as a vehicle for activism is a question that film scholars have been tackling for some time. But most would agree that film, especially Hollywood film, is designed as a product for the masses. It doesn’t want to alienate large groups of the market that might not be on board with certain political objectives. It’s very rare for a film to really challenge the market it belongs to while still celebrated in its day. But that didn’t stop companies like Disney from trying. 

We could trace the development of any one of these threads, but by the mid-2010s, Hollywood sees a heavy demand for films that elevate historically marginalized groups. The centerpiece of this was, of course, in February 2018 when Marvel Studios released Black Panther, the first ever superhero movie to center on a Black character.

And the progressive crowd absolutely recognized the opportunity this was to make this into a turning point in larger culture. There were literally Gofundme campaigns raised specifically to help Black children see Black Panther in theaters, which saw support from celebrities such as Viola Davis. Frederik Joseph, who spearheaded one such campaign, explained,

"It's my opinion that inclusion and representation really are fuel for children to dream — not just to dream, but to dream big. It's important that young people see themselves in roles they couldn't even imagine... for a little girl to see herself as Wonder Woman, or for a young child of color to see himself as the leader of Wakanda.

         Child development psychologist Dr. Deborah Gilboa added,

"Kids need role models of the live, in-real-life kind AND on screen and in action figures and comics. They need to know not only can they succeed, they need to see that lots of people want to sit in a theater and watch someone like them succeed in a big, big way. That's how we help build a generation of young people who are engaged in the greater good and courageous in their actions."

Writer and activist, Shaun King, compared the movie to such milestones as Martin Luther King Jr’s “I Have a Dream” speech or Rosa Parks refusing to give up her spot on the bus, saying, “Listen, go see it again. I’m going to go once just with my wife and even go back again with my whole family. Let’s make this moment last.”

     I’m not in a position to speak to this sort of thing personally. But I do think that these voices are tapping into something real. People need to see themselves and their stories reflected in our shared arts. And it’s likely for this reason that Disney felt confident they could apply the same methods onto their broader catalogue and get the same results.

Disney’s 21st Century Dance Recital

Flashing back over to Disney specifically, and the company in the early 2000s is in the middle of an image problem. The epicenter of this, of course, was the pushback against the Disney Princess mythology that emerged around 2000. Here we had New York Times op-eds and formal academic studies claiming Disney Princesses were directly responsible for things like the wage gap or girls’ mental health challenges.

Sleeping Beauty (1959)

         There's a lot I could get into here potentially, but fellas it took me three whole essays to cover that conversation. So, just take me at my word when I say that .... though this pushback is often done under the pretense of rigorous empiricism, some of the sloppiest analysis I have ever had to slosh through came straight from professors trying to make the Disney Princess hate sound so much more intellectual than it ever was.

    At times, detractors speak in broad generalizations about how all they do is fall into a coma and wait for a prince to kiss them (“basically all” amounts to exactly two princesses—Snow White and Aurora). Other times, it’s just a straight-up distortion of the facts. That’s how we get this Mandela effect where we have New York Times writers who will swear they specifically remember Cinderella like turning down small business loans because she is specifically waiting for The Prince to solve all her problems.

    Still, Disney started actively combatting that dialogue in the 2010s. Disney premiered Tiana and Rapunzel as princesses for the 21st century. (“See? A working-class princess. Go ahead! Call her a damsel in distress! I dare you!”) Then in 2013, the Frozen sisters take over like a blizzard, and suddenly everyone has an opinion about Disney movies again. 

Moana (2016)

    During this time, Disney Animation spends a lot of time developing stories on underrepresented communities—to much better effect than Pocahontas. They’re also able to sell a very Disney-friendly version of feminism. The 2010s brought about a whole slew of self-driven optimistic Disney heroines that sold very well to both markets.

So, Disney and the public are back to roughly the same place that they were during the Ashman days where both liberals and conservatives feel ownership over Disney iconography. Only now, it doesn’t feel like these two parties can share Disney. Both sides want to know that Disney is theirs and only theirs—but without ever acknowledging Disney as a legitimate cultural force.

Disney seemed pleased with their efforts to rebrand the Disney image with their new offerings. So, why not rebrand the image with their established offerings?

    By the time Disney+ enters the scene, those older Disney films carrying racist caricatures were flagged as including "outdated depictions." This was not so uncommon. HBO MAX does a similar thing with something like Gone with the Wind, but what started as a cautionary label eventually ballooned into a mandatory opening title, and eventually making these titles unavailable for young viewers altogether. Moreover, this copy+paste label did little to educate viewers on the nature of this content or why it was so offensive. The impulse seemed to be less about exploring or contextualizing an uncultured ecosystem and more about appeasing big brother.

But why stop there? Instead of just paying alimony to those older films that nobody liked anymore, why not just paint over them altogether?

         Almost from the beginning, Disney’s live-action remakes functioned as bargaining chips--a way for Disney to try meeting their critics on their own territory. “You hated Disney's 'Jungle Book' cartoon for ruining the Kipling books? Here’s a 'Jungle Book' for you?” The centerpiece for this was certainly the 2017 adaptation of Beauty and the Beast starring Emma Watson. Mind you, this remake wasn't so much about dragging down the 1991 film so much as reminding everyone how Belle was the only good Disney princess. The engine for this outing can probably be summed up by this explanation from Bill Condon, describing Belle as,

“... the first modern Disney princess who doesn’t want to be a princess: someone who’s more interested in figuring out who she is than in finding a guy and getting married. And that was so much a part of the casting of Emma Watson.” 

      And this line did earn a measure of favor from established writers and voices. They were, after all, giving them exactly what they wanted. Wasn’t it good that Disney was finally owning up to its mistakes? The movie landed at a cushy 71 on Rotten Tomatoes with the line around the remake being that it was a harmless little venture. And who knows? Maybe Disney’s finally learned its lesson.

  A.O. Scott, New York Times wrote, “Ms. Watson, already something of a feminist pioneer thanks to her portrayal of Hermione Granger in the 'Harry Potter' movies, perfectly embodies Belle’s compassion and intelligence …" No, not every critic fell in line with this way of thinking, but Beauty and the Beast secured the same RT score as like a phase 2 Marvel film, and that was good enough for Disney. They had a new tether to the higher culture: tell your worst critics that they were right, and they might let you in the clubhouse.

Maleficent (2014)

         And this would become the defining throughline across all these Disney remakes. They marketed themselves as necessary course corrections from the foibles of the past. It wouldn’t be for a year or two that the larger internet really woke up to what Beauty and the Beast opened the gates for. You couldn’t put Will Smith back in the bottle.

 But before the clock would strike twelve, Disney would make higher and higher bids for cultural relevancy. Initially the easiest way to do that was to offer itself up to ridicule, but eventually they started setting their sights higher. They weren’t just filling in the holes left by earlier offenses–they were going to actively move the needle.

And so on July 3, 2019, Disney broke the news that the highly coveted role of Ariel would go to African-American actress, Halle Bailey—Ariel was Black now.

Halle Bailey's The Little Mermaid

           Racebent Ariel was the central marketing point for the live-action Little Mermaid film, starting from the casting announcement and continuing in waves as production on the movie marched forth. There was some of the old programming at work here as well—the usual talk about girl power and Ariel not being a damsel in distress—but really that was just blank noise. We all knew it. There was no doubting what the real platform was with this movie. The territory on which this remake would be fought was race and Black narratives in Hollywood.

I observed a lot of genuine enthusiasm for Halle Bailey’s casting–particularly among POC individuals and communities. Disney Princesses have been a focal point of girlhood for the entire 21st century, and it made a lot of people excited to see that someone like Ariel could be portrayed in a big budget Hollywood production by an actress of a non-European ethnicity.

Racebent Ariel also triggered some very predictable backlash from alt-right sources. #NotmyAriel trended for a good while. And back when I wrote my piece on celebrating Bailey's casting, this was the crowd I had thought would potentially cause the most trouble for this project.

         But something else I observed that I wasn’t anticipating, and didn’t think too much of at the time, was the surprising number of liberal-leaning outlets who discussed the whole discussion with an air of neither joy nor indignation, just irritation. Around the time promotion for the movie started, I remember a lot of YouTube channels reacting to this sort of thing with some variation of “I’m so tired of people treating me like I’m a bad person because I don’t wanna see another soullessdisneyremake.” 

         And that was how a large portion of the internet reacted to the development of a Black Disney Princess. Not with either excitement or outrage, just exasperation. The larger culture wasn't any more eager to have Disney Princesses as the face of social progress than it was to let a cartoon be nominated for Best Picture.

    Culture critics had found a way to draw a direct connection between Disney and something like female stereotypes. But the lack of visibility of racial minorities? That wasn’t really something they had figured out how to blame on Disney. And it sure wasn’t something they blamed specifically on The Little Mermaid. This wasn’t Disney owning up to any “mistakes” it had made. This was—gasp—a chance for Disney mythology to actively advance the conversation. Meanwhile, YouTube Tyler is still using Walt Disney as the face for jokes about anti-semitism. 

And so, voices up and down the ladder defaulted to their old arguments: Disney is, and always was and always will be, purely in the business of manipulating emotion to trick the masses into offering up their money. It was just that now they were using the language of social equality to do it.

         After the teaser trailer blew up the internet, SNL released a skit titled, “Black Ariel on Disney’s Live-Action The Little Mermaid,” featuring Ego Nwodim as Ariel and Colin Jost as the host of the news report. Jost begins the skit explaining to her, “Some people are calling you a role model!” Ariel responds, “A role model to who?! Black girls who want to be a fish!”

I remember being confused when I first saw this because I honestly didn’t know what exactly the joke was supposed to be. A part of me was thinking that like this was a comment on humanizing Black celebrities who are faced with extra pressure as role models tied to specific cultural movements. But the character flaws that the skit lists have a very specific slant to them. We find out that this Ariel grew up rich (“Like, ‘Bezos’ rich”), she supported the war in Iraq, she doesn’t care about the environment …

Basically, the entire skit is spent dressing down the cultural movement assigned to Black Ariel as some kind of flagbearer for social progress. “Calm down, folks, it’s just another Disney cash grab! You can stop sharing videos of lil’ Jessica crying because Ariel looks like her!” It basically gave liberals a pass to not support the film, the way they did Black Panther, without feeling like they are neglecting their civic duty. (Or, I don’t know, maybe they’re part of the regular “Ariel is just a bad role model” crowd.)

        There’s a lot we could unpack with how crowds like SNL decided to leverage the conversation around “Black Ariel.” When selecting the targets for their joke, they didn’t look to something like the billion angry white dudes fuming on the internet—the same who would never be caught dead watching a Disney Princess movie. That just wasn’t as funny as the sect of the internet that saw Black Ariel and felt veneration or excitement.

         And I’ll clarify, I’m happy for Black Panther, both what it did for superhero movies and what it did for representations of race. But I think there’s also a double-standard at work here that has long gone unacknowledged. Was Disney trying to capitalize on social attitudes at the time with a Black Ariel? Sure. Moreso than with Black Panther, though? These were both attempts by Hollywood to capitalize on growing interest in using film to elevate historically marginalized voices. But journalists were a lot more receptive to one of these things.

And this sort of thing was on everyone’s mind when The Little Mermaid ended up underperforming when it finally premiered in May of 2023. And that’s obviously “underperforming” with an asterisk. A lot of indie-films certainly wish they could “flop” at half a billion worldwide, but compared to something like Beauty and the Beast, this movie’s performance sure looked like a failure. (I honestly wondered if part of this was just remake fatigue in general, but guess which film broke records this Memorial Day weekend?)

For what it’s worth, the movie did seem to overall find embrace within the crowd it was trying to champion. A large swath of racial minorities, particularly within the Black community, applauded this movement. Writer and therapist, Jacalyn Wetzel, wrote on her Facebook page after seeing the movie,

“What you have done with The Little Mermaid is healing middle aged Black women’s inner child. I waited my entire childhood to see a princess that looked like me. One that the other girls wanted to be and the love interest wanted to kiss.
“Seeing this movie as an adult and knowing my kids won’t know what it feels like to not see themselves in Disney movies means more than I could’ve ever imagined.
“Because of this movie, my son will always believe Ariel looks like his mom and sings the song his mom sings while she washes the dishes.
“So, thank you for healing a piece of me I didn’t know was broken. Thank you for ensuring no other child has to feel unseen by creators of magic. Thank you for giving 40-somethings like me a moment to hold onto for a lifetime.”

            Whether liberal apathy actively sowed this indifference or just predicted it, I can’t say for certain. But it was not lost on anyone that the first major Disney remake to trip at the box office was the one with “Black Ariel.” 

If this were like a one-off thing that we could blame purely on circumstances, we could put this to rest, but this was not an isolated incident.

The Spiral Continues

Peter Pan and Wendy (2023)

There’s a laundry-list of Disney flops from the early 2020s that definitely made bids for relevance with their overt political signaling. I won’t go over most of them, in part because, unlike “Mermaid” which was actually halfway decent, many of these were simply bad movies. Remove the two-second lesbian kiss from Lightyear and you still would have had a boring movie with awkward tone shifts and bland dialogue. The movie’s innumerable flaws had nothing to do with how high it scored on the woke-meter.

Disney in the 2020s would face some specific issues with a worldwide pandemic, the introduction of Disney+, and a major (and sudden) leadership transition. Those kinds of things no doubt had an effect on the ecosystem in which these movies were developed. Hence … Lightyear kinda sucked. Disney started taking real social risks with their films during a time when they were losing their creative footing.

    Thus, in 2022, Strange World lands as arguably Disney Animation’s most message-driven film on the books. Critics on both sides of the political spectrum caught onto the film’s actionable green message. The film also features a diverse ensemble cast in addition to a gay lead in the protagonist’s son.

It was also Disney Animation’s first real flop in fifteen or so years.

The movie generated much more interest as a box office failure than it ever did as a movie. Why did Disney stumble with this project? Did it have anything to do with them premiering their first gay lead? And should they have known any better?

    The issue with Strange World is that … there’s nothing really wrong with it. The movie just needed a little more time to find itself. I’m not sure what I’d say the most emotionally gripping moment of the film is. I don’t know what part of that film I’d want my kids to internalize. There’s nothing really here for viewers to latch onto. No signature “Disney moment.” I think that would look different in a film like this versus a film like Tangled, but even other sci-fi Disney movies like Lilo & Stitch or Big Hero 6 supply a great deal of emotional purging.

Strange World explores our obligation to our environment as reflected in our obligations to our lineage. These are interesting questions, but I can’t say that the movie makes the most out of this material. The “Jurassic” movies pull this off much better. Those movies, when they work, use a sci-fi scenario to explore our responsibility to the earth in tandem with our responsibility to the rising generation, whether those generations are linked biologically or not. There is absolutely precedent for this material working to great effect. (Yes, even in the Jurassic World trilogy.) I’m not saying this movie’s belly-flop was at all deserved, just that the movie had greater opportunities for excellence than it did, which had to be a part of the reason why no one came to see it.

The flopping of Strange World to me feels less like a symptom of Disney Animation becoming too woke than the studio floundering under the creative bathtub drain of Bob Chapek’s leadership. But the anti-woke mob was eager to claim this as their victory.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017)

    Around this time, other casualties mounted across other branches of the Disney tree. It was around here that "Star Wars" started to tailspin as Disney started to stumble trying to navigate, among other things, the gender politics of the fandom. Disney's subsidiaries started to flounder under lack of leadership, the same time they happened to aggressively court marginalized groups, and a faction of the internet started to imagine a link between the two.

         As this is going down, you also have The Walt Disney Company getting into all sorts of culture wars. Florida Congressman, Ron DeSantis, threatened to basically ransom Disney World unless they relented their support to opposition to Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill, support that Disney itself only expressed after considerable pushback from Disney’s user base.

         Still, in 2021, with the release of Halle Bailey’s The Little Mermaid still a good two years off, Disney announced that the role of Snow White in the upcoming remake would be played by Rachel Zegler, a Latina actress. Disney thought they had this playbook mastered: the MAGA crowd would whine a little, but the politics were on their side. Audiences would show up for Zegler’s Snow White—especially after they started promoting how much cooler she was than some hundred-year-old cartoon.

      And that’s just not what happened. 

The Trials of Rachel Zegler

    Gosh, where to even begin with this movie ...

    Little of Disney's marketing strategy for the "Snow White" remake was unique compared to something like live-action Aladdin. "Here is a movie you loved as a kid that was secretly problematic the whole time, and now we've made it safe for children. You're welcome very much." Right from the start, Rachel Zegler got herself on the radar as championing a stronger, cooler version of the 1937 heroine. And yet, the public received this film, and its revisionism, much differently than they did with something like Aladdin.

    Right off, we saw a large sect of the population suddenly discovering their devotion to a cartoon they hadn’t seen in thirty years, and decided that Rachel Zegler had crossed the unforgivable boundary. Zegler became the subject of all sorts of rage. We saw this with all sorts of online noise, but it didn't stop there. Zegler would also report having people show up to her apartment door, pounding and screaming profanities at her. And this is where we start to see the first discrepancy in the Rachel Zegler case.

Let me put it this way, here is one snippet of an actress employed by Disney speaking about Disney Princesses,

“I hope it gets echoed for all eternity when we make live-action versions of these Disney cartoons, where women are seen as a little bit less than the male characters. I think it's possible to be both a princess and a hero, and I like to be both."

Here is another from a different actress in the same position,

“That is a big problem with a lot of fairy-tales. A lot of traditionally written fairy-tales have it where the girl just gives up her entire existence and everything that’s important to her for 'some guy'.”

Only one of these actresses faced backlash for making these comments. Do you think you could guess which one? 

So, yes, Rachel Zegler followed more or less the same script as the likes of Emma Watson, but the internet did not see these two things as comparable. We saw a couple of different reactions, none of which predicted strong returns for the in-development remake. Disney had no doubt anticipated something like this would happen. They were, after all, upsetting the status quo.

    But this was during a time when they were still severely overestimating how interested the larger culture was in their social justice projects. Something we really need to establish is that it wasn’t just the MAGA mob that treated Snow White differently because it starred a Latina actress. Progressives did too.

Spectators with official outlets looked at this controversy, and Zegler specifically, not as the target of any organized hate, but as the engine of a delicious debacle. They reacted like a store patron taking their phone out to record a child’s meltdown in the checkout line so they could show their friends later. The details of the fallout were recorded meticulously, and they wasted no time drawing connections between them and what we’ve always known about Disney culture. “Why were they taking themselves so seriously? No one else was …” 

What we see is that outside critics will show a vested interest in Disney trying to be socially savvy so long as there is some kind of attempt at atonement for perceived transgressions–e.g. admitting that older princesses were rather regressive. But couch that in some other social imperative, as Snow White did, and this game just stops being fun. The alt-right probably never would have even gone for Rachel Zegler if they could have anticipated how their liberal cousins would just tune out the Snow White project. 

    By the time promotion proper started for Snow White, the marketing campaign basically pivoted hard to “look at how everyone in this movie is and always has been a huge fan of Disney!” Zegler played along with this. But she found ways to irritate the higher-ups in ways that had nothing to do with Disney Princesses.

         Zegler’s online activism became a point of contention, using an official platform to advocate to “always remember: free Palestine.” Following the 2024 U.S. election, Zegler also posted an expletive-riddled message directed at Donald Trump. This triggered more routine fury from the far-right—and even more fury from The Walt Disney company, which was trying so hard not to anger anyone's cousins from Texas.

        Also, where Halle Bailey’s public persona gave heavy vibes of “Gosh, I just feel so blessed to be here!” that made it hard for certain journalists to go after her personally, Rachel Zegler’s manic theater kid energy made it easy for writers to cast her as a sort of entitled product of the selfie generation, which made her public fallout really fun to write about. Preceding this movie’s release, Tatiana Siegel (you might remember her as one of the spearheaders for the noise around the screenplay for The Holdovers allegedly being plagiarized) tallied all the movie’s transgressions in a Variety piece,

Months later at D23, she criticized the original 1937 'Snow White,' noting that the prince ‘literally stalks’ the heroine. One top agent says that was the moment that Disney allowed Zegler to control the narrative: ‘The first time she shoots her mouth off, you nip it in the bud.’ Instead, the studio said nothing, and purists began to revolt.

         I suppose this top agent wasn’t around for Aladdin or Beauty and the Beast. No one expected Disney to nip it in the bud when Producer Dan Lin repeatedly said that animated Jasmine does nothing in her movie but pine after her man.

    That sort of thing was easier for Disney fans to forgive for a few reasons. 1. Naomi Scott (Jasmine herself) had positive things to say about animated Jasmine while still expressing excitement over the chance to boost her character in the remake. 2. Jasmine’s big girlboss number in the Aladdin remake was itself penned by Alan Menken, who you'll recall was one of the original songwriters from the 1992 film, someone who knew Jasmine from the start and could advocate for her in this new territory. (Though it is also worth noting that not every fan did forgive the remake for throwing animated Jasmine under the bus, and Rachel Zegler would certainly bear the brunt of that building resentment.)

Snow White, meanwhile, had no line of defense within the remake’s creative team, just a bunch of men in suits who all agreed that the cartoon was a dated piece of trash. Who in their right mind still even cared about those old cartoons anyway?

Oh, that’s right. Their entire fanbase …

Dumbo (1941)

I’ve polled several other Disney fans, especially those who had historically shown up for past remakes, and they have been very consistent in their responses for why they tuned out of Snow White. The remakes as a whole were starting to overstay their welcome, and they certainly weren’t going to gear up for another when the discourse around the movie had been so uniformly condescending. Few if any actually cared about them racebending Snow White, or Ariel for that matter, they were just tired of showing up for Disney and feeling like the players onscreen were laughing at them for it.

         Of course, journalists worked really hard to make this narrative about anything other than that. And being mindful of the optics around ganging up on a POC actress, they tried hard to build a new narrative: Zegler wasn’t a woman of color breaking casting boundaries and braving backlash for it, she was just a whiny Gen-Z actress obsessed with her own importance and playing with words she didn’t understand, leaving devastation in her wake. 

         The New York Times ran a piece just ahead of the movie’s premiere compiling all the delicious scandal surrounding the movie, and overviews like this had a very thinly veiled schadenfreude surrounding the movie’s very public fallout, with root in some very familiar anti-Disney bias. His take on Walt’s princesses is literally summed up as, “be pretty, and things might work out!” And the author made little effort to hide his view that the idea of making the Snow White story “relevant” for the 21st century was just a shot idea from the start.

“Over the decades, Disney had tried to modernize her story — to make her more than a damsel in distress, one prized as ‘the fairest of them all’ because of her ‘white as snow’ skin. Twice, starting in the early 2000s, screenwriters had been unable to crack it, at least not to the satisfaction of an image-conscious Disney …

“Still, Disney executives were determined to figure it out. They had some new ideas. More important, the remake gravy train needed to keep running.”

Zegler disparaging the animated film gets only a parenthetical mention.

“(Ms. Zegler had already angered fans of the original movie. ‘People are making these jokes about ours being the PC Snow White,’ she said in 2022. ‘Yeah, it is — because it needed that.’)”

     But it wasn’t just The New York Times or Variety feeding Zegler to the wolves. Disney itself also put Zegler on the hot seat--not for relaying the exact talking points they'd handed her, but for angering more Republican Congressmen.

    Shortly after Snow White’s disastrous opening weekend, Jonah Platt, son of Marc Platt, producer for Snow White, got into an Instagram comment war where he raked Rachel Zegler over the coals for her online activism. The comment has since been deleted, but in his report, he publicly called her selfish, immature, and a narcissist, laying all the blame on her not just for the film’s cratering, but for all blue-collar workers who were going to be on welfare this winter because she and she alone tanked this movie.

         There are developments that certainly complicate that thesis. A survey of the film’s box office performance indicated that conservatives were actually more likely to see the film than liberals.

“These comments fall in line with a report from Deadline that compared the live-action remake's opening weekend numbers to other films and broke the numbers down by 'red' states and 'blue' states. It found that 'red' state moviegoers actually saw Snow White in slightly higher percentages than other family and animated movies, certainly indicating those viewers were not staying away from the movie in unusual numbers.”

  Still, it’s apparently Disney’s internal narrative now that the film wrecked not because they didn’t understand their audience, but because Rachel Zegler made some Instagram posts. (Well, obviously. Everything was turning up daisies for this film all until then, right? There were no other controversies surrounding this film, right?…) Moreover, as it pertains specifically to Zegler’s comments about the 2024 election, she’s not just speaking as the face of a big-budget movie. She is also speaking as a member of a racial minority group that is absolutely being impacted by the policies and actions of the powers in place. I don’t know, was she making this conversation about her?

The wider failure of a movie no one was asking for and no one wanted was all attributed to the actions of one girl. But when you look at the fanbase that had historically shown up for the Disney remakes and why they chose not to show up for Snow White, the disaster can more or less be summed up with one major mistake: Disney needlessly put itself and its own history in competition with displays of social progression.

Tangled (2010)

    Another part of what this whole odyssey reveals to me is that the cultural gatekeepers who spent the early part of the century dogpiling on Disney, they never actually cared about things like social justice or equality--at least not when they were penning all those op-eds about Disney Princesses and toxic femininity. The way journalists reacted to something like a Black Ariel or the Rachel Zegler firestorm says to me that they never actually believed that The Walt Disney Company or the audience it catered to would be better for taking an active role in advancing social progress. They just recognized that everyone was already kinda squirmy around this whole pixie dust enterprise, and that made it a fertile target for an eloquent takedown.

And I want to be clear in saying that I'm not imagining The Walt Disney Company is beyond reproach or that it should not be questioned. I'm not even saying that any probing dialogue ought to come exclusively from fans of the brand. I am saying that critique ought to be motivated by principles, not performance. Critics ought to be consistent in their expectations--and liberal detractors absolutely were not. And meanwhile, Disney's own part in this was throwing its own fandom under the bus while believing that if they just said the right things, their detractors would ever show up for them. 

Hercules (1997)

              The gatekeepers wanted to treat this whole ordeal like one big joke. They were just gunning for the day when we could all laugh about that little phase where Disney tried to sit at the big boy table.

         But we are discovering that the fallout of this is having tremendous repercussions.

 

The Fallout

          Since Iger’s return to office in 2022, a lot of his clean-up has been specifically centered around trying to earn back favor from its disgruntled conservative fanbase. In between some gestures to diversity, Iger sort of centers the discussion on making inoffensive, non-controversial entertainment.

Tarzan (1999)

“The bottom line is that infusing messaging as a sort of a number one priority in our films and TV shows is not what we’re up to. They need to be entertaining, and where the Disney company can have a positive impact on the world, whether it’s, you know, fostering acceptance and understanding of people of all different types, great. But generally speaking, we need to be an entertainment-first company.”

In the time since, we have started to see what Iger meant by this. This has seen documented trimming of topical storylines and characters within high-profile projects. Pixar’s premiere Disney+ series, Win or Lose, had a character written as transgender only to be reverted as cisgender in post-production. We’re also seeing trimming and modification for in-development projects for both Pixar and Disney. A piece by the Hollywood Reporter interviewed several Pixar employees in 2024, spotlighting the state of affairs in the wake of things like Lightyear flopping,

“It hardly surprised me, but it devastated me,” Sarah Ligatich, a former Pixar assistant editor who consulted on the episode, tells THR. “For a long time, Disney has not been in the business of making great content. They have been in the business of making great profits. Even as far back as two years ago when I was at Pixar, we had a meeting with [then-CEO] Bob Chapek, and they were clear with us that they see animation as a conservative medium.”

    Pixar’s upcoming film, Hoppers, for example, was conceived around a very green message, but new directives around their entertainment agendas threaten the viability of these kinds of things. 

“Unfortunately, when you have your whole film based around the importance of environmentalism, you can’t really walk back on that. That team struggled a lot to figure out, ‘What do we even do with this note?'”

         In just the last few weeks, director Daniel Chong has contested the severity of the pressure that Disney actually put on the project, but from the outside looking in, the reality of that is difficult to gauge.

        This sort of thing also had direct influence on Pixar’s ELIO and the creative maelstrom it experienced, which would result in original director, Adrian Molina, departing from the project. (Whether that actually contributed to the film scoring the lowest debut of any Pixar film … is a question I’m not prepared to answer in this essay.)

    Iger's apology tour has also seen Disney openly acknowledging that, yeah, it probably was a mistake for them to release an animated film with a gay lead. This is also how we get Bob Iger paying $1 M for Trump's legal fees, plus another $15 M for his future presidential library, and also urging hosts on his network to go easy on the president. Roast the man if you want for placating a tyrant, but journalists have always been the first to cry that Disney is all about that dollar. And when so when they pull theirs away when Disney tries to play for their team, how surprised are they really allowed to be?

    [EDIT: These pieces actually went live some 30 hours before Disney's Jimmy Kimmel scandal, and I can't decide whether that's fantastic timing or terrible timing on my part, but a few things are standing out to me. I see that warzone as a very natural outgrowth of the issues tracked in this piece--Disney is seeking favor with conservatives after liberals refused to show up for them, and that's blowing up for reasons we can easily guess at. Also, while I believe that the public pushback against Bob Iger and Dana Walden is absolutely merited, and I truly hope it enables concrete action, the public's choice to punish Disney over other companies is revealing. I'm just saying, I'll bet Stephen Colbert wishes he had been cancelled by Disney instead of Paramount.]

    The MAGA flock absolutely sees the stumbling of movies like The Little Mermaid (2023) and Snow White (2025) as their victory--proof that "woke movies" just don't work and will tank at the box office. I guess the folks at The New York Times didn’t have to compare Halle Bailey to Rosa Parks if they didn’t want to, but when the cultural gatekeepers more or less washed their hands of those movies, other crowds were happy to claim them for their own purposes.

    I'm publishing this piece shortly after Rachel Zegler finished a very successful run in London starring in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s EVITA and received considerable acclaim for it. And honestly? Good for her. After everything Disney put her through, I hope she gets to do this for as long as she wants. During the first weeks of performances, Zegler responded to the backlash over her online activism, explaining,

“I can really only echo [the Hacks actor] Hannah Einbinder in saying that a platform becomes a responsibility, and that responsibility is ours to use as we please.

“My compassion has no boundaries, is really what it is, and my support for one cause does not denounce any others. That’s always been at the core of who I am as a person. It’s the way I was raised.

“There are obviously things that are at stake by being outspoken, but nothing is worth innocent lives. My heart doesn’t have a fence around it, and if that is considered my downfall? There are worse things.”

      It really is a sign of the times that I am finding myself going to bat for someone who used their platform to, perhaps inadvertently, delegitimize Disney fandom. But these are times where large corporations are showing increasing compliance with inhuman agendas, and punishing voices who dare to upset a very sterile, impersonal status quo.

    I could potentially complain for a while about Zegler not showing what I think is due respect for the first animated film ever made, but I think she has shown us what she thinks it means to be a Disney Princess in the modern world, and I can’t help but respect her tremendously for it. Honestly, the fact that she apparently made Disney mad for pulling them out of neutrality? It kind of makes me want to give her a hearty high five.

Coco (2017)

         In the meantime, we can perhaps take comfort in knowing that some of Disney’s biggest hits of the last ten years did have prominent threads of diversity. Encanto made headlines, though not until after it hit Disney+. And Moana is like the most-streamed film in the universe. The bad-faith players haven’t gone after diverse stories built from the ground up, at least not in the way they did with situations like Halle Bailey’s Ariel or Rachel Zegler’s Snow White. Perhaps there’s a future in which underrepresented cultures get a presence within Disney in original features while they just leave their old catalogue alone, and I suppose that would technically be a net positive.

         But that’s also assuming a number of things. Mostly that, having seen their success with something like the Snow White crash, they will just be content to go home and not target other manifestations of diversity. Once you’ve opened your door to the lion, you can’t just hope he’ll crawl out through the doggy door.

    A version of this essay series that was, believe it or not, even larger had a wider analysis on the perception of that group we'd call "Disney Adults." I had to jettison a lot of that to keep these pieces somewhat focused. But I feel that the subject does bear some mention because a lot of the discussion about Disney and its relationship to social activism is directly echoed in whether Disney is an acceptable subject of fandom.

    So, I guess I will say upfront that ... the people I know within the Disney community are smart. They are discerning. They are well-adjusted. If seeing a 30-year-old tearing up at the Disneyland fireworks show freaks you out a little, maybe let yourself get curious before you get judgmental. (Also, go to a professional football game with a packed stadium sometime--see the grown-men crying over other grown-men tossing around this giant rubber egg, behold the aberrant body formations and bizarre coordinated movements unfolding atop the bleachers, witness the brawls breaking out under the parking lot because someone wore the wrong color shirt--and you tell me which crowd is doing more to confuse the aliens.)

         For decades now, the cognoscenti has roasted the Disney brand, and those dumb enough to sign their name to it, for the paper fantasy it creates. What’s more, they’ve convinced themselves that it’s dangerous. And worse, those poor Disney Adults don't even know that they've been brainwashed.

But the fantasy that the larger culture has chosen to embrace–that you can chase the most powerful influence in entertainment out of the arena of social progress and not expect consequences? I have a feeling we're about to discover this fantasy is much more dangerous.

            --The Professor