Hi-ho, we're off to a new low! How did Snow White remake get so cursed?

Once upon a time, Disney made a business decision: if it was going to adapt its library of animated movies into live-action features (complete with merch and theme park tie-ins), it should add Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to the pipeline.

- Adrian Horton

The 1937 classic was the company's first full-length animated feature. Development on its 21st-century update began in 2016.

Nine years later, Snow White (as the remake is simply known) has finally made it to the big screen, but the journey has been anything but a fairytale. It has been a saga of delays, culture-war flashpoints and controversies. The new film has achieved the difficult feat of irritating both ends of the political spectrum, with the right crying "woke" over the casting of Rachel Zegler, an American actor of Colombian descent, to the left upset over the presence of the IDF-supporting Israeli actor Gal Gadot as the Evil Queen. And that's not even getting to the obvious and nagging issue of the dwarves.

The movie proved so toxic that Disney scaled back its red-carpet premiere, limiting the media presence to talent-friendly in-house press. The general vibe was one of a studio going through the motions to get the film out there and done with, stumbling over the finish line.