If my kids in remote South Africa, without Disney+, have seen it, I highly doubt you’re right about this, unless you’re intending a “most kids includes kids in rural Africa and Asia who’ve never seen a movie at all” kind of disingenuity, which I don’t think you are .
You clearly have no idea just how popular and pervasive the Disney Princesses are to a certain market segment (pre-teen girls). I very much doubt the $3 billion the line made in 2012 was a one-year blip. They are inescapable (believe me, I’ve tried!), and that includes all their films.
The point from Dinklage appears to be that this movie is so tainted to the Little People community that any remake is tainted. It’s similar to most people’s response to a remake of Song of the South or Birth of a Nation. In his opinion, the source material carries too much baggage for a well intentioned remake to avoid.
Is he right? I don’t know, but it’s a perspective that most people don’t appreciate so it’s a valuable opinion to understand.
Not front and center though. Frozen is front and center. Sleeping Beauty was easy to find. I actually had to use the search feature for Snow White to come up.
We might also mention that one of the most popular rides at Walt Disney World is the Seven Dwarfs Mine Train roller coaster, and there are (or were, before Covid–I haven’t been to WDW since) meet-and-greets with Snow White and with the dwarfs. It’s not an obscure, long-forgotten property.
It’s an interesting perspective, and of course that’s why no one is talking about remaking “Song of the South.”
There’s degrees of nuance. They remade “Dumbo” despite the racist crows in the original cartoon. In that case, however, the crows were not a central part of the film; it’s not called “Dumbo and the Jive Talkin’ Colored Folks.” Cutting the crows out of the live action version isn’t really much of a change to the story, and remaking “Dumbo” doesn’t really bring the crows to mind at all.
Can you get around the dwarfs? I honestly think you can because, of course, they HAVE remade Snow White. There have been a number of retellings of this story. I suspect Disney is just going to call it “Snow White” and figure a way around the dwarfs.
I think there are several different traditions of dwarfs in entertainment.
There are the childlike clowns, associated with court jesters and freak shows.
There are the mythological figures, associated with the earth and with Tolkien.
There are the well-rounded characters who have the condition, associated with Peter Dinklage and the Station Agent.
The Snow White dwarfs were between the first two categories, I think–but the cartoon leaned heavily into the first category. Removing a lot of the clownishness and making them more serious and, I dunno, sexy (and don’t give me “But it’s Disney,” did you SEE Maleficent?) might make it better.
Again, I’m super unsure about this, just wondering rather than claiming.
For the most part, all of Disney’s remakes have been a pretty straightforward 1:1 redo. A different song or two here, a character made gay there (but not too much as to avoid plausible deniability), but otherwise the same plot.
I’m relatively tall, and I was still a little pissed about how they turned Gimli into comic relief. I can pretty easily imagine Peter Dinklage’s response to the “dwarf tossing” joke.
The books, I’m not sure about. The Hobbit has a bit of a Snow White vibe, but not LotR. It might help that, in both books, the dwarves are taller than the protagonists.
Which, by the way totally pissed me off. Gimli was a noble character. It was the secondary hobbits who were comic relief in the books, and even they were pretty kick-ass. They gave the Gimli/Legolas brotherhood to Aragorn/Legolas, and totally cheated Gimli. I liked the movie, but I hated that aspect of it.
In addition to the dwarf jokes, of course, Gimli was already a beloved character. Making him clownish was going to anger people for that reason, too. It was a very strange decision.
I think the comments here about ways the remake could potentially address the dwarf issue are a good argument against those who say Dinklage was premature in his complaints. Isn’t it much better to raise the issue now when there’s time to remake the characters, versus complaining after its release when the only (non)option is to pull it entirely?
That’s a really good point. Plus, the argument about “we don’t know how they’re going to handle the dwarf thing!” doesn’t really resonate with me. Disney is talking up the other progressive changes they’re making, like casting a Latina actress to play Snow White. If they had some idea of how they were going to make the dwarf characters not offensive, they’d be talking about that too. Their silence on that point is telling.
Kind of a side issue, and hopefully this doesn’t come across as an attempted derailment/threadshitting, but I’m wondering if we really need another Snow White at all. I’m not arguing against remakes in general, but I just don’t know if there’s anything worth salvaging once you remove the problematic elements of this story. As best I can recall, it’s a tale of female jealousy and cruelty, with no acts of bravery or cleverness by the protagonists. A beautiful and vain queen is driven to repeated attempts to murder a child for the crime of being prettier. The child’s prettiness is exemplified above all by her whiteness, for which she is named, which frankly makes casting a nonwhite actress just seem icky and weird to me, like making a body-positive remake of Gone With the Wind in which Scarlett O’Hara’s 18-inch waist is still a plot point, but they cast Melissa McCarthy and just play it straight. Anyway. The child runs away and is taken in by a bunch of dwarves, but the queen tracks her down and poisons her. Then a prince shows up and revives her with a kiss, and they live happily ever after, because he’s a prince and she’s pretty, and uh, I guess the dwarves go on mining. What part of this apple isn’t poisoned?
Of course we don’t. And Apple doesn’t need to release new iPhone models each year (with only seemingly minor differences). But this is how commerce works.