Snow White
As time has gone on, movie-goers have not just taken to social media to complain about movies, they have voted with 1 star ratings where they can, and that has now happened with Snow White, positively nuked into oblivion on IMDB with 227,000 reviews putting it at a 1.5/10, far and away the lowest score of not just every blockbuster of a similar budget, but almost all the movies on the entire site.
Is Snow White that bad? Of course not, and this is all ridiculous. The movie has 91.1% 1-star scores, which creates a graph that looks like this:
IMDB
Every time “review bombing” is brought up, there is always pushback saying that the movie is “really that bad,” but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a more clear-cut case of a movie being purposefully review-nuked for culture war-adjacent reasons.
In addition to that absurd chart, you can head over to Rotten Tomatoes to see that actual audience reception for Snow White. Yes, its critic scores are the lowest of all the major live-action Disney adaptation at a 41%. But audience scores, which Rotten Tomatoes uses “verified ratings” for to (mostly) ensure people who are voting have seen the film are all the way up at a 74%. Or, if this was IMDB, a 7.4/10. But IMDB allows for free voting for any user without any verification they’ve watched the movie. And so, you get situations like this.
Snow White
The campaign against Snow White is more about a campaign against one actress, Rachel Zegler, where she has been harassed about everything from her race to her comments in interviews to her political statements supporting Palestine. That last item recently spawned a Variety story unfavorable to Zegler, relaying that a producer of the movie flew to New York to ask her to take down a “Free Palestine” tweet, which she refused to do. This is despite most critical reviews saying that if anything, she’s the one bright spot of the entire movie.
Is Snow White a great movie? The answer is no, not especially, though at least a decent amount of viewers seem to have liked it well enough. But if you want a mathematical demonstration of just how much hatred this movie, and more accurately, Zegler, has sparked online, look no further than these 227,000 reviews and that 1.5 score, which is lower than just an absurd amount of other bombs: Battlefield Earth, Dragonball Evolution, Gigli, Cats, Glitter, Catwoman, Rollerball and more, all of which are at least in the 2-3s/10.
Zegler is now moving on to play the lead role in Evita in The West End from here, after a Broadway run of Romeo and Juliet. The question from here is whether Hollywood will continue to cast her in big films, given what a lightning rod she’s become, even if it’s been no fault of her own and she’s now been used as a scapegoat for what just isn’t a very good movie.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
