Snow White
For a film plagued with scandal, with a long-delayed theatrical release, the first notices for Disney’s Snow White were surprisingly benign. On second thoughts, perhaps it wasn’t surprising that a movie so comprehensively “cursed” should receive a swathe of glowing tributes from the influencers and bloggers who were given a first look. I don’t know whether these individuals were regally wined and dined by the studio, or if they are dumb enough to genuinely believe they saw a good film, but it’s a familiar pattern of media manipulation.
For the Hollywood studios, the first week’s box office is crucial in determining a film’s ultimate success or failure. If a new release is greeted with a chorus of bad reviews and poor audience figures, it’s hard to recover momentum in the marketplace. When that film cost $270 million to make, the stakes are high enough to prompt the big players to splash out some hospitality on the noisy bottom feeders of social media, who can be relied upon to do the right thing.
It'll take a week or two before a greater range of opinions kicks in, but I suspect no amount of artificially generated early buzz can save this utterly redundant live-action remake of a Disney animated classic. The desperate expedient is to hope that enough lazy, “arts and entertainment” reporters will parrot the propaganda about the positive early responses, most likely before they’ve even seen the film.