Greta Gerwig Had Limited Involvement in Disney’s Live-Action Snow White Movie
If you’re planning on seeing Disney’s live-action Snow White in 2025, it sounds like you shouldn’t expect Greta Gerwig’s signature touch — or a preview of what to expect from her future Narnia adaptations at Netflix.
Gerwig was originally announced as a co-writer for Snow White in 2021, but based on recent comments, her time working on the film was short-lived. In a new interview on Screen Daily, Gerwig spoke briefly about her involvement with the upcoming Disney film:
I was hired for a couple of weeks. I did a ‘pass’ — I wrote some jokes.
Gerwig also talked about her upcoming Narnia adaptations for Netflix, which she described as:
Quite the Everest. I’ve been thinking about it since before I directed Barbie. That feels like a theme — I had written Little Women before I directed Lady Bird, then I went back to Little Women and rewrote it after Lady Bird.
Want to learn more about Greta Gerwig’s future Narnia films? Here’s everything we know.
The live-action Disney remakes series has largely been disappointing so far, but I guess there is always hope that Snow White could change that fact.
It’s not necessarily that any of the movies have been outright terrible, it’s just that even at their best they feel largely redundant, as they struggle to say anything new or interesting, and don’t really manage to achieve anything that exceeds the original source material.
I also feel a lot of them miss the essential qualities that made the originals great, and in particular struggle to adapt the larger-than-life elements of the cartoons, especially when it comes to the musical numbers.
In fact, probably the only cartoon I’d be keen to see them adapt into live action is the one that was the least successful in the animated format in the first place…. and that is The Black Cauldron
@Icarus, I honestly think the 2019 Aladdin is more thematically interesting than the 1992 one though I don’t consider either of them profoundly great movies or anything. (I’d just call them really fun pieces of fluff if you enjoy their genre.) But I think most of the main characters and their relationships with each other are more interestingly written. And I honestly don’t get why people found Robin Williams’s genie so funny. (I mean, I’d describe him as fun but not particularly funny. How many actually funny things can people quote him as saying?)
Sorry for bringing all this up like I wanted to pick a fight or something. It’s just interesting me that so many people see the 1992 movie as so obviously superior to the 2019 one and I really don’t get it. (And, no, I don’t have anything against hand drawn cel animation! I’m actually very nostalgic for it.) I wrote a post about it on my blog (click my name if you want to search for it), hoping someone would respond with counterarguments but they never did. C’est la vie.
This will be good news for the fans who didn’t like the fact that Snow White has been reported as too progressive in its worldview. And that Gerwig was a writer on it, making it look like her worldview is progressive too. It may or may not be, but her 3 previous writer/directorial films all demonstrate that she has a great understanding of human nature and what makes us tick. And a way of being sensitive to emotions and the ability to address real issues well.
Can I just say I think all the controversy about that Snow White movie is kind of…hypocritical? People are always saying that the recent Disney remakes are blindly copying the original and then when they hear that one of them is going to be really different and more modern than the original, they get all mad. What’s up with that? (Maybe it’s different groups who are getting mad. I don’t know.) The alternative Snow White that the Daily Wire is making, which I’m sure they’re doing purely out of spite, looks like a copy-and-paste version of the 1937 movie and if were Disney were making it, people would complain about it. But because the Daily Wire is making it, their fans will support it just to stick it to Disney. It’s so silly!
Also, maybe it’s because I loved her performance in West Side Story, but all the animosity toward Rachel Zegler bugs me. Maybe she is a terrible person, but I bet a lot of actors you love are terrible people too. It doesn’t make sense to me to say that Mel Gibson should be given a chance and not Zegler.
Of course, a big part of my attitude may be the result of me not thinking of the 1937 movie as the definitive version of Snow White. The fairy tale existed before that movie. There were adaptations of it before and there have been adaptations since (even if most of the coming afterward were basing themselves more on the Disney movie.) My favorite is probably the 2001 made-for-TV version. I wrote about the Faerie Tale Theare episode on my blog just last month. In recent years, there have been Mirror, Mirror, Snow White and the Huntsman and ABC’s Once Upon a Time, all of which made Snow White more feminist-friendly. I feel like people are just getting worked up about the upcoming movie because of the Disney brand name and not looking at it from a neutral perspective. (I’m not saying it looks or sounds really great from a neutral perspective. It’s just nothing to get worked up about. Nobody’s being forced to watch it.)
Just so you know, Col Klink. People not wanting a remake to be a blind copy of the original, doesn’t mean they will be happy with ANY version which is different from the original. I wouldn’t want to see the upcoming Avatar: The Last Airbender show being a shot for shot live action version of the cartoon but I want it to be true to the spirit of the original. Nobody expects Narnia movies to be exactly like the books but if the Netflix version looks like the mockery of the original, you probably wouldn’t be too happy. You accuse people of hypocrisy and spite very easily.
And no, the Daily Wire version of Snow White can’t be like the 1937 Disney version because they don’t have the rights to the animated movie. They can only use the original fairy tale, which is in public domain. And how can you already tell it’s a copy and paste, anyway, when you saw virtually nothing of this movie?
@Anna Alice, I’ve only seen the first trailer for the Daily Wire Snow White (Is there a second one out by now?) but if you just look at an image of the character of Snow White from it, she looks exactly like the Snow White from the Disney movie. (Black hair, white skin, blue top) The movie also emphasizes deer and other woodland animals even though the only mention of animals in the fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm is that they don’t eat Snow White. To be fair though, most adaptations of the fairy tale, while they claim to be adapting Grimm, are really copying Disney. If they really cared about the original story, they would have Snow White vomit up the poisoned apple after her glass coffin gets a jolt instead of her being magically awakened by a kiss. If you see it and they do, tell me. Maybe I’ll check it out.
The reason I think Daily Wire is making the movie out of spite is the marketing. Normally, when you market a movie, you want to show something different and specific about it. But their Snow White trailer is so bland and generic and why is that so? Because people complained that Disney’s new Snow White, based on the actress’s comments, was different from the 1937 movie. So they’re trying to show how much better they are than Disney by making there’s as boring as possible. Also, the actress playing Snow White for the Daily Wire (whose name I cannot remember) made a point of saying in interviews how much she loved the story of Snow White growing up and how she admires its values whereas the actress playing Snow White for Disney said she never liked the 1937 movie as a kid and believes it has bad messages-and people castigated her for having an opinion to which she had a right. (It’s not an opinion I share with her at all but I’m not going to wish doom on her career because she has it. There are actors who have opinions I think are worse but whose performances I enjoy.) The Daily Wire actress is clearly trying to show everyone how much nicer and more conservative she is than the other actress. Doesn’t that strike you as obnoxious? Both movies, I imagine, were greenlit because they would make money, not because anyone had a great idea for a new Snow White movie. And I’m OK with that as long as the movies are enjoyable. But let’s not act like the Daily Wire is doing this out of disinterested love of fairy tales. Do you really believe they would have made a Snow White movie if it weren’t for the controversy around Disney’s upcoming one? (One of which we’ve seen even less footage than the Daily Wire one, but which people are fine with judging, I might add.)
(This next paragraph is going to be me disagreeing with both actresses BTW.) What’s really ridiculous about all this controversy is that the story of Snow White is not political. The only value in the old Disney movie is “be cheerful no matter how bad your circumstances” and the only message in the Grimm fairy tale is “don’t be a crazy serial killer who’s obsessed with being the most beautiful person in the world.” There’s nothing particularly rightwing about them.
I will say this though. In an above comment, I mentioned that I really enjoyed the 2019 Aladdin movie. But when I saw the first teaser trailer, I thought the movie looked like a boring cut-and-paste job and felt pretty cynical about the whole thing. But then other trailers were released featuring jokes that made me laugh and made the movie look like it might be fun in its own right. Maybe there will be future commercials for Daily Wire’s Snow White that make it look good to me too. I’m not particularly expecting it because the company is known for complaining about politics, not for making quality entertainment but it’s not impossible.