Disney’s Snow White remake needs to send a new mes­sage to young audiences

Dis­ney are bring­ing the sto­ry of Snow White back to the big screen in the form of a brand new live-action adap­ta­tion. Accord­ing to the Hol­ly­wood Reporter, screen­writer Erin Cres­si­da Wil­son (Chloe, The Girl on the Train) has signed on to pen the musi­cal update, which will fol­low big-bud­get remakes of Beau­ty and the Beast, Mulan and Peter Pan.

With strong female leads becom­ing more and more preva­lent, it’s now Disney’s turn to step up to the plate and imbue Snow White with a new mes­sage for a 21^st cen­tu­ry audi­ence. But will Wil­son be able to rec­on­cile the orig­i­nal story’s ​‘sur­vival of the fairest’ pow­er play in a crit­i­cal land­scape where beau­ty as the mea­sure of female worth is no longer tolerated?

In recent years sev­er­al attempts have been made to stamp out the damsel in dis­tress arche­type, offer­ing younger audi­ences a more self-suf­fi­cient hero­ine. We’ve seen Kris­ten Stew­art as an armour-clad Snow White in the first Hunts­man movie from 2012, and Angeli­na Jolie as the psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly dam­aged Malef­i­cent, each striv­ing to regain lost female pow­er. Yet both these films had to dras­ti­cal­ly rework the orig­i­nal sto­ries into dark­er fairy tales fit for mod­ern consumption.

Direc­tor Ken­neth Branagh took a more tra­di­tion­al approach with his recent Cin­derel­la, spout­ing the annoy­ing refrain ​‘have courage and be kind’ as often as pos­si­ble. In Mir­ror Mir­ror, Lily Collins becomes the leader of her ban­dit dwarfs to defeat her evil ​‘old­er’ step­moth­er say­ing, ​“I’ve read so many sto­ries where the prince saves the princess, it’s time to change that end­ing.” But in every case, the play to accom­mo­date a more empow­er­ing mes­sage has either been too bla­tant, too corny, or too shallow.

So can Wil­son sal­vage some­thing from these attempts to realign the Dis­ney princess with­out com­plete­ly chang­ing the tone of the sto­ry? Is this even pos­si­ble? Her most recent screen­play for The Girl on the Train fea­tures in Emi­ly Blunt’s Rachel a cen­tral female pro­tag­o­nist who couldn’t be fur­ther from the del­i­cate, pas­sive vir­ginal girl in Disney’s clas­sic 1937 ver­sion. Per­haps with Wil­son at the helm, Dis­ney will final­ly deliv­er a major new adap­ta­tion that doesn’t deal in out­dat­ed gen­der politics.