WHISTLE WHILE YOU WOKE!

Heavy-handed political correctness, an outspoken leading lady and threats of a boycott... as the first Snow White trailer is released, why you don't need a magic mirror to predict Disney's £160million new live-action film is in danger of coming a cropper

- Peter Sheridan

SOME train wrecks happen without warning, flying off the rails at speed on a sharp bend. Others you see coming in advance, with an obstacle on the track far up ahead.

For Disney's £160million liveaction movie Snow White, the rails are buckled, the bridge has collapsed, the engineer has jumped overboard and the train is steaming out of control towards a yawning chasm four months before the film even reaches British cinemas.

"It's looking like a disaster before it even hits movie screens," says one Hollywood studio executive, with some measure of schadenfreude. "It's certainly a marketing catastrophe. Snow White is the crown jewel in the Disney pantheon-how could they let it get so out of control?" Snow White might be wishing she could find another poisoned apple and slip back to sleep in her glass coffin. The vintage fairytale has apparently fallen victim not to an evil queen or a huntsman's axe, but to the perils of "woke" culture and a succession of controversies. Disney has been accused of updating the story with heavy-handed political correctness, just as the US is turning away from progressive woke extremism with a resounding election victory for anti-woke crusader Donald Trump.

"People are making these jokes about ours being the PC Snow White," says the new version's titular star Rachel Zegler, 23. "Yeah, it is because we needed that." Snow White was Walt Disney's original princess, unveiled in 1937 in the first fulllength animated feature film. She was a heroine for the era: a vulnerable beauty who loved house-cleaning so much that she whistled while she worked.

Though the film's lengthy and costly production brought Disney to the brink of bankruptcy, its success transformed the studio into a Hollywood juggernaut, paving the way for animated classics Bambi, Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty, followed by modern classics The Little Mermaid, Beauty & The Beast and The Lion King.