Disney’s live-action “Snow White” had a sleepy opening weekend, bringing in only $43 million on a film that cost $209 million to make. Megachurch leader Greg Laurie has a theory about the dreary debut.
Laurie, the founding pastor of Harvest Christian Fellowship in Riverside, California, explained in a recently posted video that the original “Snow White,” first published in 1812 by the Brothers Grimm (and released by Disney as an animated film in 1937), was a “moral fable” chockfull of biblical parallels.
The preacher said the 19th century story is “about good versus evil,” centering on “a vain queen so obsessed with their own beauty and status she’s willing to murder an innocent girl just to remain the fairest in the land.”
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“Sound familiar?” Laurie asked rhetorically. “That’s basically the story that we read about in the Bible, about Lucifer, a once high-ranking, powerful angel who wanted to take the place of God with himself. The problem with Lucifer is he was in love with his own image; he wanted to be in the place of God.”
Laurie, one of the most famous pastors of the Calvary Chapel movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s, centered his criticism on the parts of the “Snow White” story Disney reimagined for its just-debuted remake of the 1930s animated classic. Chiefly, he took issue with the erasure of “Some Day My Prince Will Come,” a pivotal song in the film’s original score, and the eponymous character’s shift away from dependence on a knight in shining armor and toward self-reliance.
In the original fable, Laurie said, Snow White is “resurrected from her death-like sleep [and] saved by the prince,” which, he argued, “is not all that different from a Christian worldview.”
Instead of singing “Some Day My Prince Will Come,” though, “Snow White” star Rachel Zegler performs a new song, “Waiting on a Wish,” a song Laurie described as being about “female empowerment and self sufficiency, because, heaven forbid, we acknowledge the timeless human desire for love, redemption, and rescue.”
He went on to say Disney has “lost the point” of the story, adding, “Disney has sunk $270 million into this movie, hoping audiences will embrace this new vision of ‘Snow White.’ Time will tell how that turns out.”
Much of the ire for the movie stems from Zegler, who condemned the original animated movie as “dated,” even telling Variety in 2022, “[Snow White’s] not going to be saved by the prince, and she’s not going to be dreaming about true love; she’s going to be dreaming about becoming the leader she knows she can be.” At another point, she called the general storyline of the movie “weird.”
While not widely reported, Zegler actually went on to tell Variety her character is “dreaming about becoming … the leader that her late father told her she could be if she was fearless, fair, brave, and true.”
Although he is a minor character, Snow White’s father, the Good King, can be seen as an allegory for Jesus. When she is brought out of her deep sleep after receiving “love’s true kiss,” Snow White becomes a representative for her father — the one true king — and is able to confront the Evil Queen with the strength imbued in her by her father.
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