The film, combined with The Little Mermaid, created more carbon emissions than some major airports do in a year

At a screening of the new Snow White movie in London last month, influencers walked through an artificial fairytale forest, complete with a full-size thatched cottage filled with models of furry animals. In the US, Disney paraded an actual bunny in a brown knitted jumper down the red carpet at the film’s Hollywood premiere.

But the film’s theme of being at one with nature seems not to have extended to the real-life environment, with company documents showing the making of Snow White generated more greenhouse gas emissions in the UK than the latest Fast & Furious film, despite the latter’s reliance on an array of gas-guzzling cars.

Disney’s latest live-action adventure has been at the centre of various controversies over casting, alleged feuds and delays

Once upon a time, Disney made a business decision: if it was going to adapt its library of animated movies into live-action features (with merch and theme park tie-ins galore), it should add Snow White to the pipeline. The 1937 classic – the company’s first full-length animated feature ever, its first crack at a veritable goldmine of princess IP – would follow the modernizations (and attendant revisions) of Cinderella and Beauty and the Beast, released in 2015 and 2017, respectively. It was only logical, Snow White being one of its most recognizable and brand-defining characters. The company began developing a live-action feature in 2016, in the heady first wave of its IP era.

Nine years later, Snow White has finally made it the big screen , but the journey has been anything but a fairy tale. The remake has been a saga of delays, culture war flashpoints and controversies, some earned and much not. The new Snow White has managed the difficult feat of being a children’s movie that irritates both ends of the political spectrum at once, from rightwing nuts crying “woke” over the casting of Rachel Zegler, an American actor of Colombian descent, to pro-Palestine advocates upset over the presence of Israeli actor and IDF supporter Gal Gadot as the Evil Queen. And that’s not even getting to the obvious and nagging issue of the titular seven dwarves.

With tiresome pseudo-progressive additions that tie the whole thing in knots, this is a waste of estimable entertainers like Rachel Zegler and Gal Gadot

That title is a description of the page on which new Hollywood ideas get written. Here is a pointless new live-action musical version of the Snow White myth, a kind of un-Wicked approach to the story and a merch-enabling money machine. Where other movies are playfully reimagining the backstories of famous villains, this one plays it straight, but with carefully curated revisionist tweaks. These are all too obviously agonising and backlash-second-guessing, but knowing that at some basic level the brand identity has to be kept pristine. This is particularly evident in the costume design, with which the wicked witch gets a pointy dark crown and skull-hugging black balaclava and Snow White is lumbered with a supermarket-retail tweenie outfit with puffy-sleeved shoulders. Those otherwise estimable performers Rachel Zegler and Gal Gadot are now forced to go through the motions, and they give the dullest performances of their lives.

Traditionally, the heroine’s name refers to her skin, with lips red as blood and hair dark as ebony; now it refers to the snowstorm that accompanied her birth. Zegler’s Snow White had loving parents in the King and Queen but after her mother’s death her father becomes infatuated with a witchy new noblewoman at court; Gadot’s lips are at all times seductively and contemptuously pursed. But later the King simply vanishes from the story and the script ties itself into a few pretzels explaining what is supposed to have happened to him and when. The stepmom-witch keeps Snow White in Cinderella-style serfdom below stairs where the poor child wanly sympathises with the population’s poverty. As Snow White grows up, the magic mirror breaks the bad news about a change in the prettiness-ranking; Snow White is then forced to flee to the forest and stay there once the huntsman has lied to the witch about killing her. And then she meets her seven new best friends …

Police and protesters clashed at Hollywood ceremony for Israeli Wonder Woman star who has been vocal in support

Pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian protesters disrupted the Hollywood Walk of Fame ceremony for Israeli actor Gal Gadot on Tuesday, delaying the event and inciting police response.

Several dozen protesters gathered ahead of the ceremony for the Wonder Woman star, who is an outspoken supporter of the Israeli military. According to Variety , pro-Palestinian protesters held signs that read “Heroes Fight Like Palestinians,” “Viva Viva Palestina” and “No Other Land Won Oscar,” referring to the documentary on Israeli incursions onto Palestinian land in the West Bank that won the award for best documentary this month.