The Fairest Flop: Snow White and the Power of Publicity

Illustration by Izzy Felix

Think back to the summer of 2023. You may have been moving from high school to college or transitioning from a freshman to a sophomore at SCAD, like I was. Maybe you were working a summer job, or you just scored a dream internship. One thing consistent for all of us, however, was the absolute abundance of the color pink in our memories. This will forever be known as “Barbie” or “Barbenheimer” summer. All because of the sheer amount of advertising and publicity surrounding the movies Barbie and Oppenheimer. The real question is, did you see both “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer”? Because I did. And personally, I would have always loved to see “Barbie”, but “Oppenheimer”…I would have never sat through three hours of a movie about atomic bombs if it weren’t for all the internet chatter about it. Both movies were great, in my opinion, but would either of them have been as successful if it weren’t for that viral tweet about their shared release date? I believe that publicity and advertisement for a film are incredibly impactful to its overall success and can make or break a film’s performance.

Like I mentioned, publicity served “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” very well. They were all anyone could talk about, and even had people dressing up to see them. On the other hand, you have a film like the live-action “Snow White” that was released this past month. Now, I haven’t seen “Snow White”, so I can’t say whether the film is actually all that bad, but due to the image surrounding the movie, I have no interest in going to the theater to see it. There are so many layers of public controversy behind this film. It all started a couple of years ago when the stars of the movie, Rachel Zegler and Gal Gadot, went on an interview and spoke about how this version of “Snow White” was going to be more independent and adventurous. They basically said she doesn’t need her prince in this story. That ruffled a lot of feathers as many people critiqued this skewed version of feminism and argued that they completely lost the essence of the original “Snow White”. This interview, along with others featuring Zegler making rather opinionated comments, created a negative image of the main actress in the film. There was controversy with Gadot as well, where many people did not agree with her political viewpoints. Then there was a whole other drama surrounding the dwarfs in the film. First, a few people complained about the hiring of people with dwarfism for these types of roles. That caused the production to change direction and use  VFX for the dwarfs. This then caused people to be upset that they didn’t hire people with dwarfism, arguing that they don’t have many role opportunities and they just took more from them. Not to mention, the VFX  did not have the budget to create super realistic-looking dwarfs for the film. All of this combined caused people to start hating this movie a whole year before its release, and now that it is released, it is absolutely tanking at the box office. This huge disappointment has even caused Disney to halt their production of a live-action Tangled movie in which Michal Gracy was set to direct. The movie itself is not getting great reviews, but for me personally, even if it were getting average reviews, I still wouldn’t want to see it because of the bad taste I have in my mouth from all of the negative connotations surrounding the film. This film was a big blow to Disney due to its publicity.

I think publicity and advertisement choices can also alter how much one enjoys a movie. I recently wrote an article about the movie “Companion” which is a great example of how advertising can positively? negatively? affect a movie experience. That film is advertised as a psychological thriller and reveals almost nothing of the plot. Then, when you go see the movie, you find out that the main character is actually a robot. Their advertisement tricked me into a sci-fi film that I normally would not have gone to see. It also preserved the main character’s perspective at the beginning of the film so that you find out she is a robot at the same time she finds out she is a robot. Had they advertised her clearly as a robot, I would have had a completely different experience of that film.

Lastly, I believe that advertisement choices heavily impact a film’s chances of winning certain awards. Take “Wicked”, for instance. The performances, visuals, and were very polished and well done, yet they lost almost every nomination during this year’s awards season. I suspect it is because of the way they advertised with kids’ toys and many different lines of Wicked-themed merch. I think that the Academy and other awards organizations tend to look down upon films that get too big and mainstream, like “Wicked” did. It’s  rare that you see the very popular films winning Oscars, but rather, you tend to see the smaller indie films win. On the other hand, the film “Anora” did not spend much money on advertising, but rather spent more on Oscar campaigns than they did on their actual movie. And it paid off as they swept at the Oscars, winning Best Picture in 2024. These choices for how to spend money on advertisement and publicity heavily impacted how these two films performed at award shows this year.

In the end, as much as navigating the media can be challenging, it is extremely vital to the health and life of a film. In the world we live in today, you can’t simply make art and expect it to sell without also using the power of advertising and image in order to make that art sell. Without the power of advertising, even the most brilliant cinematic masterpiece risks being overlooked. After all, if no one knows a film exists, how can they ever watch it?