Disney Cancels the Important Jonathan Majors Awards and Postpones the Live-Action Snow White Film

Disney is reevaluating how two of its upcoming titles will be released. On Friday, the studio announced that it had completely canceled Jonathan Majors’s presumed awards drama Magazine Dreams and postponed the upcoming live-action Snow White by a year. The changes occur amid a protracted actors’ strike that has not ended and controversy that has been tempered by both movies.

The film Magazine Dreams, which Disney’s Searchlight Pictures picked up from Sundance, was supposed to come out on December 8. However, that date would have coincided with Majors’s misdemeanor assault and harassment trial, which was the result of a purported domestic dispute. November 29 is when the trial is supposed to start.

Disney has not disclosed any other plans for the release of the movie, which received positive reviews upon its Sundance premiere and was dubbed a “terrifying wonder” by Vanity Fair’s chief critic. The actor entered a not-guilty plea to the charges.

One year after its initial March 22, 2024 release date, the live-action Snow White film starring Rachel Zegler will now make its stage debut on March 21, 2025. The film has faced criticism, unseen, regarding how it might portray dwarfism. Actor Peter Dinklage has called the original fairy tale “fucking backward” and questioned whether it really needs to be told again, which has led to the delay.

In a statement, a Disney spokesperson replied with the following: “To avoid reinforcing stereotypes from the original animated film, we are taking a different approach with these seven characters and have been consulting with members of the dwarfism community. We look forward to sharing more as the film heads into production after a lengthy development period.”

“People are making these jokes about ours being the PC Snow White, where it’s like, yeah, it is—because it needed that,” Zegler herself said to Vanity Fair in the previous year. Our version of the 85-year-old cartoon tells a novel tale of a young lady who serves purposes other than “Someday My Prince Will Come.” Nobody would have predicted that some would object to Zegler’s apparent criticism of the 1937 animated film.

Not all Disney titles are currently in circulation. Elio, an animated science fiction movie that stars America Ferrera and Jameela Jamil in voice roles, has also been rescheduled from March 1, 2024, to June 13, 2025, a year earlier than planned.

These movies have been rescheduled along with several others due to the actors’ strike, including Challengers and Dune: Part Two, which will now open in the spring of 2024.