Rachel zegler

Unless you have been rock-bound over the last few weeks – or avoiding all social media, which in 2025 amounts to much the same – you can scarcely have missed the controversy over the recent three-night gala staging of the Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar at the Hollywood Bowl. Jesus, you see, is not played by a white man, as is customary, but Cynthia Erivo, the Wicked star who is black, female and queer. This has not gone down well with traditionalists, but Erivo is one of the most talented singers working today – as well as a fine actress – and so, if the first reviews are to be believed, she blew the roof off the Hollywood Bowl, stealing the show entirely from a starry cast including Adam Lambert and Josh Gad.

Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who is the most annoying of them all? The answer, it seems, is Rachel Zegler, the new Snow White, who has managed to turn herself into an international hate figure because she can’t keep her progressive political views to herself. The upshot is that Disney’s $350 million remake of one of its most famous films is flopping at the box office. It generated $45 million in ticket sales in its opening weekend. That sounds a lot, yet it’s a lot less than other recent Disney adaptations brought in, even including other woke disasters such as 2023’s Peter Pan & Wendy. Reviews of the new Snow White have been overwhelmingly negative, too.

Disney’s new Snow White is a live-action remake of the beloved 1937 classic that was cinema’s first full-length animated feature and is still regarded as Walt’s greatest masterpiece – even if fans of The Jungle Book will always have something to say about that. It stars Rachel Zegler, which set the cat among the pigeons, as she is Latino so doesn’t have ‘skin as white as snow’. However, because I’m not a stickler for ‘historical accuracy’ when it comes to fictional characters in fairy tales, this didn’t bother me. The problem with the film isn’t that it’s gone ‘woke’, it’s that it contains workaday narrative, blandly generic characters and a leaden script that wrings all the magic from the story.

When you first hear that a remake of West Side Story is on the cards, it’s: God, why? Why would anyone look at West Side Story, which won ten Oscars in 1961, and think: that needs doing again? Who would do that? Steven Spielberg, that’s who, and as it had garnered mostly five-star reviews before I’d had a chance to watch, the question became: how? What wonders might he have brought to a film that was great and beautiful in the first instance? Not much. It is more authentic. The back stories are more substantial. The singing and dance numbers are bigger. There’s a part for Rita Moreno, which is neat. But in being more so it is also peculiarly less so. Plus there is an elephant in the room. Two, actually.