Disney's 'Snow White' Remake Taps Marc Webb As Director
Marc Webb may be the director of the next live-action Disney remake that will sweep audiences (and box offices) off their feet. The director of The Amazing Spider-Man films and (500) Days of Summer has been tapped by Disney to remake the 1937 classic animated film Snow White, the studio's very first animated feature that kicked off a century-long legacy.Variety broke the news that Marc Webb is in talks with Disney to direct the upcoming live-action remake of Snow White. The Amazing Spider-Man and Gifted director is reportedly the studio's top choice to direct the Snow White remake, which will potentially be penned by The Girl on the Train screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson, who is also currently in negotiations with the studio.Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, the songwriting duo behind La La Land and The Greatest Showman and who recently penned an original song for Guy Ritchie's live-action Aladdin, will write new songs for the movie, which Marc Platt is on board to produce.Snow White will be the latest in Disney's line of live-action remakes of its beloved animated films, which recently saw films like Dumbo and Aladdin fly onto the big screen. But Snow White has proven to be a popular story to adapt in recent years — probably due to the character's residence in the public domain — with films like Mirror Mirror starring Julia Roberts and Lilly Collins and Snow White and the Huntsman starring Charlize Theron and Kristen Stewart offering darker takes on the classic tale.
However, the Disney adaptation of Snow White will likely hew more closely to the story and music of the 1937 animated classic, in the vein of the other nostalgic remakes that have struck a chord with audiences and proven to be easy money for Disney. But other than those nostalgic nods, there isn't much to glean from this potential creative team — Webb is an bland-to-bad choice in director, breaking out with the acclaimed (500) Days of Summer but proving to be alarmingly inconsistent in his other films like the awful Amazing Spider-Man movies and the sentimental Gifted. Meanwhile, Wilson's biggest credit, The Girl on the Train, is a trainwreck of a melodrama that admittedly had some pretty weak source material. These two are strange choices to shepherd the live-action version of Snow White, which is an institutionally accepted classic but one that doesn't quite have the same nostalgic potency of '90s films like Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King. Pasek and Paul have the strongest resume of the team, though I wonder how their poppy showtunes could fit in with the classic songs from the original Snow White.
No release date has yet been set for the Snow White remake.