Disney’s delaying its upcoming live-action Snow White remake starring Rachel Zegler, but the studio’s also just released a new photo of the film’s take on the seven dwarfs that’s rather… let’s say “interesting.”
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Disney has decided to push back the release dates for director Marc Webb’s Snow White and Pixar’s new feature Elio, from director Adrian Molina. The delay is in response to SAG-AFTRA’s ongoing labor strike, which reportedly has multiple studios considering the possibility of having to rearrange their 2024 release schedules to make up for the lack of new work. Though Snow White was originally meant to debut on March 22nd, 2024, it’s been pushed back to March 21st, 2025, and Elio, which was scheduled to hit theaters on March 1st, 2024, will now release more than a year later on June 13th, 2025.
In a seeming attempt to get ahead of the delay news, Disney also shared a new image of Zegler in costume as Snow White alongside the classic fairy tale’s dwarfs, and while the lead actor looks more or less as expected, her companions all appear to be varying degrees of, well, alarming the longer you stare at them.
This new official image comes months after set photos from the film’s production prompted conservative critics to accuse Disney of “going woke” by portraying the seven dwarfs as a racially and physically diverse group of people, as opposed to a septet of offensive caricatures of people with dwarfism. At the time, Disney emphasized to Vanity Fair that while those early photos were from Snow White’s set, they were not official and depicted “stand-ins” for some cast members.
Obviously, set photos aren’t always indicative of how a movie’s ultimately going to turn out, and Disney’s new image does seem to indicate that the live-action Snow White is going to take notes from the 1937 film. But given the approach Disney’s taken to updating its other recent big-screen remakes, it wouldn’t be at all surprising if both photos show us exactly what the new Snow White’s dwarfs are going to look like given how tricksy curses are sort of a big deal in the story that made them famous.