Why has Disney’s new live-action remake of “Snow White” flopped at the box office? Is it because the dull trailer looked A.I.-generated, or because the film’s stars, Rachel Zegler and Gal Gadot, appear to have sourced their costumes and makeup from Party City? Is it because the film personifies Hollywood’s status as a bottle-and-can redemption center for moldering I.P.? Is it for being a movie nobody asked for, about a princess who falls asleep?

The prospect of the “Snow White” reboot has been irritating various constituencies for some time. Conservative critics griped that Zegler, who is partly of Colombian descent, wasn’t white (these kinds of complaints were louder a few years back, when the Black actress Halle Bailey was cast in Disney’s live-action “Little Mermaid”). Some were offended that Zegler talked trash about the 1937 original. The actor Peter Dinklage questioned why the story was being dusted off at all. “You’re progressive in one way,” Dinklage said, referring to Zegler’s casting, “but you’re still making that fucking backward story about seven dwarves living in a cave—what the fuck are you doing?”

At some point, Disney started asking itself the same question. Despite the film’s two-hundred-and-seventy-million-dollar budget, the studio scaled back the première and promotional blitz and may have delayed making tickets available for pre-order. Currently, on IMDb, “Snow White” is being “review-bombed,” with more than ninety-one per cent of users giving it the lowest rating: one out of ten.

Recent articles in Hollywood’s top industry broadsheets pin much of the blame on Zegler. The Hollywood Reporter observed that the movie “has been under fire for years on social media due to a combination of the film’s progressive creative decisions”—presumably referring to Zegler’s casting—“and star Rachel Zegler’s controversial comments.” In a Variety article, which promised to take readers “Inside Disney’s ‘Snow White’ Fiasco,” a “top agent” rebuked the studio for permitting the twenty-three-year-old actress to “control the narrative” by making a lighthearted quip to a reporter about the stalker-like qualities of the original movie’s Prince Florian. “The first time she shoots her mouth off, you nip it in the bud,” this agent said. (Incidentally, the screenwriter of the new “Snow White,” Erin Cressida Wilson, has said that she centered the character’s journey toward “discovering and trusting her own voice and her own purpose with compassion and strength.”)

Variety also zoomed in on an episode from August, shortly after a teaser for the movie dropped, when Zegler shared a message of gratitude to fans on X, adding, in a separate post, “and always remember, free palestine.” The article implied that Zegler’s post fuelled death threats against her co-star Gadot, who is Israeli. It also reported that one of the film’s producers, Marc Platt, was so incensed by Zegler’s pro-Palestine message that he flew to New York to admonish her in person about it.

The detail about Platt seemed to strain credulity, but it was later confirmed by his son Jonah, who wrote on Instagram, “Yeah, my dad, the producer of enormous piece of Disney IP with hundreds of millions of dollars on the line, had to leave his family to to fly across the country to reprimand his 20 year old employee for dragging her personal politics into the middle of promoting the movie for which she signed a multi-million dollar contract to get paid and do publicity for. This is called adult responsibility and accountability. And her actions clearly hurt the film’s box office.” The younger Platt may have also been alluding to an Instagram post that Zegler made following the November elections, in which she lamented the “deep, deep sickness in this country that is shown in the sheer amount of people who showed up for this man who threatens our democracy.” She concluded, “Fuck Donald Trump.” Zegler later apologized for her Trump-related remarks, saying, “I let my emotions get the best of me.”

Placing the failure of “Snow White” largely at Zegler’s feet—as many insiders in Hollywood are evidently eager to do—is almost perversely flattering to her. The Walt Disney Company has a market cap of nearly a hundred and eighty billion dollars, and yet, in Variety’s telling, this international conglomerate could not “overcome the backlash that had been brewing like a fairy tale cauldron.” I am no box-office analyst, but, for what it’s worth, my kids are squarely in the “Snow White” demographic, and I don’t think they were lukewarm on going to see it because its star has insufficiently nuanced opinions about Prince Florian, President Trump, or the Israel-Hamas war. (An open letter from film journalists criticizing Variety’s coverage of Zegler has about a hundred and eighty signatures.)

The reasons behind the implosion of “Snow White” are structural and multifaceted, and emblematic of an industry that has no new concepts and poor judgment about which of its old ideas warrant revival. For example, Disney recently pulled the plug on a streaming series based on “The Princess and the Frog,” which is easily the best and most modern of the Disney-princess movies: glorious New Orleans blues-jazz-gospel soundtrack, outrageously stacked cast, makes an airtight case for marrying for money—the works. (And no dwarves in caves!) Whether it’s the fate of “Snow White” to become a symbol of the anti-woke, anti-D.E.I. fervor that characterizes the Trump II era or it’s simply a casualty of reboot fatigue, the identity and political views of one performer could never have sunk the film on their own.

The Platt anecdote and the framing of the Variety article in which it first appeared point to what is perhaps the most interesting aspect of the “Snow White” debacle: the film’s position in a larger narrative about which kinds of views on the Israel-Palestine conflict are acceptable in Hollywood—or anywhere in the U.S. circa 2025, really—and who is permitted to air them. The top Hollywood agent Maha Dakhil stepped away from her role as co-chief of C.A.A.’s motion-pictures department after she shared—and then deleted and profusely apologized for—an Instagram post that referred to Israel’s military attack on Gaza as “genocide.” The actress Melissa Barrera was fired from the “Scream” franchise for expressing pro-Palestinian sentiments online. In contrast, the actor Mark Ruffalo won his fourth Oscar nomination in 2024 despite vocal opposition on social media and elsewhere to Israel’s military actions in Gaza. Ruffalo’s fellow-actor Guy Pearce, one of the most prominent pro-Palestine voices in the film world, earned his first Academy Award nomination this year and sat in the front row at the ceremony, where “No Other Land,” about the I.D.F.’s demolition of a Palestinian community in the West Bank, won the Oscar for documentary feature.

In other words, there would appear to be space in Hollywood to demonstrate sympathy for the more than fifty thousand human beings that Israeli military forces have killed in Gaza, as well as for the roughly twelve hundred human beings that Hamas killed in its October 7th terror attack on Israel. But you must be the right sort of person to demonstrate such sympathies, and you must use the correct terminology. One might speculate that Ruffalo and Pearce have more latitude than Dakhil and Barerra because they are both middle-aged white men. And yet, last year, after the director Jonathan Glazer won an Oscar for his astonishing Holocaust film, “The Zone of Interest,” an open letter circulated in Hollywood to condemn his acceptance speech as supporting a “blood libel,” attracting more than a thousand signatories (Jonah Platt among them). One Academy member likened Glazer’s measured words to a “Hamas rally.” Among Glazer’s offenses was in using the word “occupation” to refer to the occupied territories and invoking the “dehumanization” of both Israelis and Palestinians in the ongoing war.

The tenor of this conversation presumably informed a recent statement issued by the C.E.O. and president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, after Hamdan Ballal, the Palestinian co-director of “No Other Land,” was badly beaten by Israeli settlers in his West Bank village and then detained overnight on an Israeli military base, his whereabouts unknown to family and friends for hours. “Understandably, we are often asked to speak on behalf of the Academy in response to social, political, and economic events,” the AMPAS statement read in part. “In these instances, it is important to note that the Academy represents close to 11,000 global members with many unique viewpoints.” The text did not mention Ballal by name, or enumerate any of the unique viewpoints one might have on his terrifying situation. (After an outcry by hundreds of Academy members, AMPAS issued an apology for neglecting to name Ballal.)

The organization released its non-statement of non-support on behalf of a freshly minted Oscar winner on the same day that video emerged of a Tufts University student, Rumeysa Ozturk, being accosted outside her apartment building by masked, plainclothes ICE agents; she was handcuffed, detained, and flown to a facility in Louisiana, reportedly for co-authoring an op-ed in a student newspaper citing Israel’s “clear violations of international law” in Gaza. Ozturk’s arrest, which has sparked worldwide condemnation, was made possible by precisely the two conditions that Zegler’s controversial posts acknowledged: the subjugation of Palestinians and the election of Donald Trump.