Toward the end of the Great Depression, many Americans looked to Hollywood with a keen sense of anticipation. Walt Disney, who had exploded onto the movie scene a few years earlier with his delightful Mickey Mouse and Silly Symphony animated shorts, had launched a new project, something never attempted that many industry veterans deemed foolhardy: a feature-length animated film. Convinced that animation was suited only to brief bursts of comedy and could never hold an audience for 90 minutes, they deemed it “Disney’s Folly.” But when Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs premiered on Dec. 21, 1937, it proved the naysayers wrong. The movie was an enormous success as audiences cheered and the critics swooned. It went on to become one of the most popular and profitable films in movie history, as well as the Disney Studio’s most cherished creative artifact for many decades.
Fast forward 90 years. In March 2025, after several years of troubled production, Disney released a new live-action remake of Snow White (minus the dwarfs in the title) amidst a storm of controversy. Initially beset by delays tied to Covid and the Hollywood writers’ strike, the project fell prey to bickering over cultural stereotypes and suffered from the studio’s ham-fisted attempts to update the story. Its star’s outspoken political pronouncements caused additional problems. The cinematic result, it is fair to say, has impressed neither the American public nor the critics. Ticket sales have lagged badly while reviews have ranged from unenthusiastic to devastating. Disney is poised to take an enormous financial loss on the project.
The contrasting fates of the two films throws into high relief several larger problems tormenting Disney—a notable creative decline, an embrace of identity politics, and an economic strategy pricing many ordinary people out of its market, and a seemingly determined effort to alienate its mass audience. The result has been a loss of the innovative ethos and democratic spirit that fueled Disney’s rise. As a historian who has written on the rise of Disney and sources of its appeal, I believe that Uncle Walt would be mystified by his organization’s modern course of action, and likely angry at the result.
Artistic ferment bubbled vigorously at Walt Disney Productions during the decade and a half following its founding in the mid-1920s. The young movie entrepreneur from the midwest, in concert with a talented group of visual artists and story men working at the ramshackle studio on Hyperion Avenue in north Los Angeles, pioneered a series of groundbreaking innovations: making the first sound animated film, the first color animated film, the first feature-length animated film, inventing the storyboard to plot out cinematic narratives and the multiplane camera to augment the illusion of depth in animation, and experimenting with marrying classical music and animation. Inspired by Walt’s directive (“I want the characters to be somebody, not just a drawing … somebody that you really care about”), the studio developed sophisticated new notions of “personality animation” and “acting animation” in which animators enhanced the illusion of life by connecting the emotions, traits, and thoughts of characters to their physical actions. The resulting Mickey Mouse and Silly Symphony shorts in the late 1920s and early 1930s earned widespread praise as both entertainment and artistic triumphs, with some commentators even talking about “Leonardo da Disney” and “Mickey Mouse and Michelangelo.”
But it was Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs that epitomized the Disney Studio’s groundbreaking ethos. Walt launched it in the summer of 1934 when he summoned the entire staff to a large sound stage, announced that he wanted to make a feature-length animated film, and proceeded to act out for the next two hours, alone on the stage, the story as he envisioned it along with all the characters. According to the attendees, he held them “spellbound.” For the next two years, the Disney studio embraced a frenzied work schedule to produce a spectacular film.
Appearing in late 1937, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs secured 15,000 booking contracts in the first few months of its release and became the highest-grossing film of 1938. Adjusted for inflation, the original Snow White over its lifetime has earned the most money of any animated film in history, over $1.5 billion. The critics were ecstatic in their praise. As one observer dryly noted after surveying the outlandishly favorable reviews, “Snow White gets six A’s, 10 stars, 8 bells, a dozen full moons, and three or four Halley’s comets.” In 1939, the film was given a special Academy Award for “a significant screen innovation” consisting of one large Oscar and seven miniature ones. In 2008, the American Film Institute named it the greatest American animated film of all time.
The reasons for Snow White and The Seven Dwarf’s success were evident. Its fairy-tale story of a princess who overcame misfortune to find happiness and true love resonated with audiences, as did the magical, richly imaginative atmosphere. Deploying Disney’s unique “personality animation” and “acting animation,” the movie presented fully developed characters with whom viewers could identify. Snow White, the Prince, and the Huntsman attracted the sympathy and admiration of viewers, while the Queen and her alter ego, the Witch (the first of many great Disney villains), generated fear as the embodiment of evil.
“The film also carried a subtle but powerful social charge.”
The film also carried a subtle but powerful social charge: a populist regard for common people shaped by Walt’s midwestern upbringing and sharpened by the travail of the Great Depression. Disney’s defense of ordinary, hard-working American citizens as they struggled against adversity, a problem highlighted by the economic collapse of the 1930s, had shaped earlier short films starring Mickey Mouse and Three Little Pigs. His first feature film carried forward these themes by bringing together a princess “outsider” and seven dwarfs, a small group of fellow souls nestled deep in the forest who stole the show upon entering the film. Ordinary miners with a strong work ethic—as they tramped off to their labors every morning, pickaxes slung over their shoulders, singing “Heigh Ho, It’s Off to Work We Go” and chanting in unison, “Dig, dig, dig” as they bent to their backbreaking task—these diminutive characters with charmingly differentiated personalities protected Snow White and aided her in defeating the evil Queen. They represented, in this case literally, the triumph of the little guy.
As Walt’s great experimental triumph in moviemaking, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs stood for decades as a symbol of all that Disney stood for. Thus many were skeptical when the studio announced a live-action remake of the film. This attitude, it turns out, was richly justified.
“Snow White immediately ran into objections on identity grounds.”
The modern Snow White immediately ran into objections on identity grounds. Peter Dinklage, a little-person actor and activist, lambasted the studio for remaking “that fucking backward story about seven dwarfs living in a cave together.” But other dwarf actors campaigned to fill the roles, arguing that there were all-too-few opportunities in Hollywood for little people. Terrified of offending someone, Disney frantically proclaimed its intent to “avoid reinforcing stereotypes from the original animated film” and vowed “a different approach with these seven characters.” Finally, it nixed the dwarf characters altogether and replaced them with CGI-generated “magical creatures.”
Then the star of the movie, Rachel Zegler, began waving a social justice political banner in a series of interviews. She dismissed the original 1937 movie as retrograde with its “big focus on her love story with a guy who literally stalks her,” calling it “weird, weird.” And she promised her Snow White was “not going to be dreaming about true love; she’s going to be dreaming about becoming the leader she knows she can be.” Zegler also tore into Donald Trump with a series of tweets saying “Fuck Trump” and “may Trump supporters and Trump voters and Trump himself never know any peace.” She tweeted “always remember, free Palestine” while promoting the film. This conduct generated a substantial public backlash before the film was even released.
When it appeared, the new Snow White’s flaws were evident. Disney replaced the charming fantasy of the original film with a crude political allegory where a utopian kingdom of equal status and material wealth, presided over by Snow White’s royal parents, falls victim to the machinations of an Evil Queen who creates an authoritarian state, seizes wealth, replaces honest work with a surging militarism, and nurtures a stultifying atmosphere of fear. Snow White escapes her imprisonment and joins forces with a social justice resistance of Robin Hood-like figures to lead a successful revolution as the princess proclaims, “This is our kingdom. We’re here to take it back!”
This vaguely revolutionary political parable is bolstered by a steady injection of multicultural and therapeutic nostrums. The crowds that gather periodically in this medieval European kingdom are inexplicably populated with blacks, non-white Hispanics, and Asians; the gang of bandits is similarly multicultural, and two of the key characters are black. The personal growth and recovery movement gets its spotlight from a reworked Dopey, with the film carefully explaining that his silence does not stem from low intelligence but from low self-esteem—he is too intimidated and scared to speak. Snow White becomes his faux therapist, offering encouragement and teaching him to whistle as a step toward self-expression. The princess herself, true to the mental-health crisis among modern teenage girls, endures an anguished struggle to overcome her anxiety caused by a reluctance to act.
The modern Snow White’s magical creatures—they look exactly like dwarfs—are a muddle from the get-go. Neither drawings nor living, breathing being, these CGI creations exist in the uncanny valley, evoking a discomforting, eerie feeling. Despite being the stars of the original film, they have little to do in the modern version since the bandit resistance now shoulders the task of protecting the princess and promoting her interests. The magical creatures just hang around.
Not surprisingly, the new Snow White has lost money, and lots of it. According to The Hollywood Reporter, given its large production budget, the film needed a box office of roughly $500 million to break even. Early returns suggest the film may not reach half that figure. But it would be a mistake to write off the current Snow White disaster as an isolated case. In fact, it reflects all too clearly Disney’s deeper, broader problems over the last two decades.
In traversing the entertainment landscape of the 21st century, Walt Disney Productions has erected several barriers to its own progress. Following the company’s renaissance in the late 1980s and 1990s, when Michael Eisner and his team produced hits such as The Lion King, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and The Little Mermaid, the company has grown stagnant. This situation is the result of a series of misplaced policies and approaches.
“Remakes run counter to the emphasis on innovation that Walt established.”
Most obviously, the Disney Studio seems to be suffering from creative exhaustion, a malady reflected in its increasing reliance on remakes of its own earlier productions. Over the last 30 years, Disney has made 22 live-action versions of older films, including Pinocchio, Lady and the Tramp, 101 Dalmatians, Dumbo, Cinderella, and Alice in Wonderland. Remakes run counter to the emphasis on innovation that Walt established. As he once told an interviewer, “Around here we don’t look backwards for very long. We keep moving forward, opening up new doors and doing new things . . . and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.” This sensibility inspired not only Disney’s animation inventions in the 1930s but its 1940s experiments combining animation and real actors in movies; the 1950s forays into live-action films, nature documentaries, television, and then “color” television; the creation of the theme park with Disneyland; and the venture into utopian urban planning with the EPCOT project in the mid-1960s. Throughout, Disney and his growing team of “Imagineers” constantly developed new approaches and techniques such as audio-animatronics for the 1964 World’s Fair, the WEDway “people mover,” and a xerographic process for animators to transfer their drawings directly onto cels.
A second cluster of problems stems from the political crusading that has ensnared Disney in the contemporary American culture wars. Over the last couple of decades, it has become one of the most demonstratively woke corporations in the United States with its embrace of gender and racial identitarianism. It has altered or removed rides at Disneyland—most notably Pirates of the Caribbean, The Jungle Cruise, and Splash Mountain—to remove questionable images. It has added “content advisories” to movies such as Dumbo, Fantasia, and Aladdin warning viewers about racial and ethnic stereotypes. It welcomes a yearly “Gay Day” at Disney World and has publicly affirmed Pride Month “to recognize and celebrate the contributions, culture, and experiences of the LBGNTQ+ community.”
But Disney’s political correctness goes much further. Leaked videos and transcripts revealed an animation producer gloating that the company gladly accepted her “not-at-all-secret gay agenda” pushing for same-sex kissing and trans characters in upcoming films. The Disney Parks diversity and inclusion manager announced that Disneyland and Walt Disney World had “removed all of the gendered greetings” at the park because they excluded non-binary and trans individuals—so no more “Ladies and Gentlemen, Boys and Girls” to welcome visitors. Another content manager vowed to make half the characters in Disney productions LGBTQ and racial minorities by the end of the year. Disney’s Pixar animated series, Win or Lose, removed a transgender storyline from this chronicle of a middle-school softball team because of public backlash, although they kept the transgender character. Chanel Stewart, a transgender actress who won the role at age 14, reported that she was “very disheartened” by the decision since she had been excited “to share my journey to help empower other trans youth.”
Disney’s “Reimagine Tomorrow” training program for employees promotes the precepts of critical race theory. Training modules urge workers to recognize their own “white privilege” and “white fragility” while contemplating America’s “systemic racism” and “racist infrastructure.” They present essays warning that since “even babies discriminate” against other races Disney employees must dedicate themselves to “raising race-consciousness in children.” The company has endorsed a “21-Day Racial Equity and Social Justice Challenge” where participants fill out a checklist calculating their privilege: “I am white,” “I am heterosexual,” “I am a man,” “I still identify as the gender I was born into,” “I have never been raped,” “I have never been called a terrorist.”
The politicization of Disney is a betrayal of its guiding spirit. With the founding of the company in the late 1920s and over the next 40 years, Walt consistently appealed to the human love of innocence and fantasy, and the yearning to see the triumph of good over evil. As he once put it, “I do not make films primarily for children. I make them for the child in all of us, whether we be six or sixty.” Sending the company to the ramparts of the culture war has undercut that agenda.
A third set of problems has emerged on the economic front, particularly in Disney’s theme parks. Many loyalists have reacted with growing bitterness to the sharply increasing prices for tickets, food, and merchandise. When Disneyland opened in California in 1955, guests could buy admission plus 10 rides for a total of $2.50, which adjusted for inflation would be $28.74 today. When Disney World in Florida opened in 1971, admission plus a book of tickets for seven rides cost $8 in total, or $61.66 in current dollars. Now, the cheapest one-day tickets to Disneyland or Walt Disney World are $104 and $116.09 during the off season, $180 and $175 during the summer and holiday seasons. Access to the Lightning Lanes, which allow visitors to partially circumvent the long lines for rides (which can be up to 90 minutes) can cost another $17-$41 daily per person. Certain very popular rides are not included; using the Lightning Lane specifically for “Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance,” for example, would cost an $25 extra per person. Food and souvenirs at the parks also cost a lot more. A Mickey Mouse ice cream bar that cost $2.59 in 2010, if adjusted for inflation, should cost $3.78 in 2024. Instead, it has a price of $6.29.
To get the big picture regarding the cost to families, the Disney Tourist Blog has estimated the cost of a four-day Disney World vacation for four (2 adults, 2 kids) including park tickets, lodging, and food. Following a “budget” model would cost around $4,500; a “moderate” strategy that allowed some extravagances would come in around $5,700. Lightning Lane passes would add another $25 per person per day and the inclusion of airfare, parking, and souvenirs would add another $1500-$3000. So the typical family of four visiting from out-of-state should anticipate spending between $6,000-$8,000 for their Disney vacation. When considering the huge crowds, generally mediocre food, and very long wait lines for most rides, it is little wonder that many ordinary middle American families are being priced out of the market. Over the last few years, attendance at the theme parks has decreased as many consumers have decided the experience is either unaffordable or not worth the cost.
The economic consequences for the Walt Disney Company, while not yet dire, have been disturbing. In late 2022 and 2023, difficulties erupted as stock prices fell to historic lows, several big-budget films fizzled at the box office, streaming services stalled, and park attendance declined. The company reacted by replacing CEO Bob Chapek with former CEO Bob Iger. Iger quickly announced a plan for $5.5 billion in cost reductions, including a round of major layoffs. In early 2025, Barron’s reported that Disney shares were down nearly 25 percent making it the third-worst performer in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. The company’s most recent quarterly report is optimistic about stock value and profits, but only time will tell if this uptick is temporary or long-term.
Disney’s recent struggles with creative stagnation, political disputation, and economic turmoil have combined to create the most dangerous prospect facing the company: alienating its traditional audience of middle-class and working-class families. For several generations, these ordinary Americans have provided the bulk of support for Disney and its array of entertainment productions. Walt, describing himself as “Mr. Average American” and vowing “to never make a film that my wife and daughters couldn’t see,” specialized in making innovative, innocent, uplifting, and wholesome family entertainment. But now the Disney company seems bent on shifting its base of support away from such common folk toward a more select group with politically correct social views and a fatter wallet. It is a risky strategy.
The present Disney company seems determined to cloud Walt Disney’s pioneering entertainment vision. It has rejected creativity for cashing in, fantasy for activism, and affordability for upscale appeal. Rather than making innovative productions that appeal to the childlike innocence in all of us, Disney relentlessly cannibalizes its existing catalogue of movies for remakes and imbues them with progressive pieties. It becomes increasingly difficult not to see this dreary parade of retreads as a cynical, even desperate, maneuver to extract dollars from the pockets of consumers by trading on the Disney name. No wonder the studio seems to be losing its long connection to a middle American audience.
At the climax of the new Snow White, the phrase “I remember” emerges as the galvanizing factor in the story. Standing on the drawbridge as leader of a revolution and addressing the Evil Queen’s soldiers, the princess emotionally pleads for them to recall happier days when her royal parents visited their homes, supported their farms, and encouraged social harmony. Upon hearing this appeal, the stricken guardsmen declare one-by-one, “I remember,” lower their weapons, and go over to her side. Sadly, those same two words are spoken by millions of Disney devotees who recall the past achievements of this once exalted creative enterprise and yearn to see once again authentic, innovative, uplifting new productions. Now if only the leaders of the company, as they face the future, would wake up every morning and likewise say of the studio’s legacy, “I remember.” Disney’s future may depend on whether they can do so.