What's Going On With Snow White? An Interview With Ben Shapiro

now most of you are probably aware that in the next year or two we could very well be looking at a snow white versus Snow White Face Off one of those movies is being made by Disney and stars everyone's favorite actress Rachel Ziggler and the other is being made by the daily wire in direct competition like most of you I had no real idea what the thinking behind this movie was so I decided I might as well ask the guy behind it and he agreed to have a chat with me so well this is my interview with Ben Shapiro enjoy Bo what is this movie all about like what uh started it off where did you get the first idea for it um and what are you hoping to accomplish with this one so we got the idea for it literally the day that Rachel zler did an interview in which she said that she hated the original Snow White and wanted to rip the guts out of it and and then Disney released those ridiculous cast photos of of dwarves that were not dwarves the the multi-racial multi-ethnic tall people and one dwarf and uh and it was at that point that this is how we make decisions in the daily wire I I literally just emailed that to my business partner Jeremy boring and I was like we should do something like this and Jeremy's like okay we're just going to make Snow White so we decided that we were going to do a very rushed movie of Snow White but we're going to do it to all the specs with music with singing with the original storyline in classic fashion that imbibes from the original well of the values specifically because if Disney wants to see that field to us we'd be fools not to take it and we're kind of shocked by the fact that no other Studio has done that I mean just on a pure Market basis if if you have one of the most significant film achievements of all time one the most popular movies of all time and the people who are making the remake of that movie in live action fashion have decided to betray that movie and say out loud it's not even like a surprise they're they're saying out loud we want to betray this movie we don't like the original values that a woman is reliant on a man she's a girl boss who's going to be I know fighting the witch on her own and the prince is going to be standing off to the side if there is a prince at all and if she's not a transgender non-binary Snow White whatever like it would be IDI not to go back to you know the thing that works and do the thing that works in the face of the thing that clearly is not going to work and Disney has a horrible habit of doing this they keep taking some of the greatest IP of all time and they're still living off the money from that IP right I mean they're putting up on Disney plus all these placards ahead of Aladdin saying this movie is super offensive but I saw they didn't take down the movie right they still know that we all want to subscribe so our kids can watch the original Aladdin they're making money off of it but then they'll make the the live action Aladdin make it way worse and for for a quick money grab well if if I can essentially grab if if our company can grab the legacy of the original Snow White then why would we not do that we we should do that yeah no it makes sense and um I don't think any of us expected the reaction that uh came with the uh the Disney version of Snow White like there's you know there there's certainly been people who have been less enthusiastic about the the liveaction remak they've done I'm definitely one of them um and it's it was very much a case of okay here comes another one uh then they cast Rachel zler is Snow White and you think okay well it's it's a race swap of the character and it seems a bit nonsensical given the the nature of the Germanic Legend but okay fine and the name of the movie and the plot of the movie and the fact you want I don't care about the skin color of the characters but when the literal line from the movie is skin as white as snow yeah and that's why her name is Snow White it makes it kind of weird to that like so why is her name Snow White I'm confused yeah she's pure okay yeah fine oh fine okay sure then we had the the dwarves which are no longer dwarves cuz Peter dingl got mad about it and so we don't have them and we don't even have this the story about true love over like overcoming all because it's no longer about that it's according to Rachel Ziggler it's about Snow White's quest for power uh so you you've lost everything every aspect of the original movie and um it really just seemed like the perfect storm it was I mean a lot of the other Disney movies you've seen them playing around the edges of this right what they'll do is they'll do a remake of Beauty and the Beast and they're not fundamentally undercutting it they're just making a worse version of the original and then they'll be like and also lefu is gay and you're like okay in the original movie he's a sick event he's not gay I see what you're doing it's a sop to whatever crowd you think you're appealing to I don't know who's like man I wasn't going to see Beauty and the Beast but now that lefu is gay I'm totally in I'm not sure what the logic was on that but apparently it pleases someone okay fine it's stupid but if you want to all right or or the or the Little Mermaid where it's like okay this is a Danish this is a Danish fairy tale and that is why ariiel has red hair and we've all seen the memes of how every redhe ends up as a black person in the Disney films don't be a redhead in a Disney film is is is the message but the but okay fine like and I can see that you're trolling for you're trolling for the audience hatred which they've really been doing a lot since the Kathleen Kennedy Star Wars since the rose Tio stuff since the you know the audience reacts badly to a character it's because we it's the audience the audience is wrong it's the Principal Skinner thing you know it can't be the kids are I could be wrong or the kids the kids must be wrong and and so Disney's really been playing a lot into that but they hadn't fullon just said you know what we hate our original movie like hate it and we are going to got that and we're going to wear it face around like a like a weird Hannibal Lector mask and that's that's essentially what they pledge to do and so that's such a great Market opening for us to to put out something competitive and obviously they got wind of that because now they've they've completely recast it they they have created really horrible looking dwarves who are who are giant who are they're still giant because they had I'm assuming they're facing C over over the actors and oh man yeah we saw look terrible by the way they look awful like they rushed out that image of the CGI dwarves who are now enormous so now Snow White is is I don't know she's Gulliver and like it looks awful but I think they were forced to and now they're saying they're delaying it for a year and they're pretending that it's not about having to recut it and redo it and all the rest of this sort of stuff so you know little public pressure go goes a long way I would hope that Disney starts to learn the lesson I mean listen I love Disney right I grew up on Disney Disney like classic Disney Is My Jam we were we were annual past members we were in California for years my family my kids everything same thing at Disney World when we ended up moving to Florida and now I won't subscribe to Disney plus because of this crap and I think there are a lot of people who feel the same way yeah I mean well you and I are roughly the same age I guess and um we probably grew up in the 90s and that was that Golden Era of of Disney Animation where you got things like Aladdin you had the Lion King you had yeah um and you know those movies were a big part of people's childhoods and so now to see them um you know just get tarnished and remade for modern audiences uh it's it's increasingly demoralizing and particularly something like um Snow White where it was literally the movie that put Disney on the map as an animation studio and yeah to to hear Rachel zegler just say yeah this movie sucks and um you know Prince Charming was a weird crazy stalker um it's I love the Babylon be's take on this which is that you see Prince Charming come into frame and Snow White is is on the table and he goes up to her he's about to kiss her and then he goes no then he just walks away that's the the movie stay dead I can't get consent so I have to stop I mean yeah that it's just um it like I say it was The Perfect Storm of just everything bad about modern film making and so it was an interesting thing for you guys to come along at that time and say hey we're just going to do uh a version that's that's fair and um accurate to the The Source material and and that's on Jeremy Jeremy's doing amazing work I mean he's really the creative director when it comes to this sort of stuff and so it's easy for me to say you know we should make something it's it's another thing to kind of put that on film and make that materialized and and Brett is going to be for it cuz she number one has the right Valu there's never going to be an interview of Brett talking about the evil morality of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves and and so she also happens to be a really talented actress and she can sing so it should be a lot of fun yeah uh I saw comment from her to the effect of you know this is a Timeless story and it's uh it's excellent uh you know fairy tale and I'm just really honored to be playing this character and I hope I can do it justice and I thought that just the perfect thing to say it's so easy it's so simple and yet somehow the So many actors fail at just saying that it's not about putting this modern spin on it it's not about redefining this classic story it's just about um I don't know having a bit of uh respect for I think that's one of the big things not just about the creators you know at da web but also the people who were casting in these movies the reason the star system died in large part is because we got too much exposure to what the Stars think if you look at the original Hollywood Hollywood really shielded its Stars the idea was that the only thing you ever saw of the Stars really was on Oscar Knight and also just the stars in the movies you really didn't know that much about their personal lives they the studios really worked hard to keep that shielded they tried to keep scandals in the closet they the idea was that these were people who existed only in your mind and only on the screen and so they were Larger than Life and then we started getting the opinions of these people like oh they're morons just like my neighbors I mean these are like this is like the annoying person on Facebook except she's famous like why do so she's rich and she's famous and she's good-looking and she's whining about American society I'm not interested in that you want to destroy the star system that's an excellent way to do it it made them mundane um and it really yeah like you say it shed light on like how they're not these magical beings that are more lightened than the rest of us the best example by the way Tom Cruz right so Tom Cruz if you look at his career Arc he was a studio star and then he made the mistake of going public with his with his private life the ktie Holmes stuff the Scientology stuff and he goes through a period in the wilderness where everybody sort of treats him like regular person and then he realized I need to stop this and he stopped it and now he's a movie star again yeah and that that's actually the way that you should approach your job if you're a movie star be a movie star no one cares about your political opinions no one cares about what you have to say about tax policy do the thing that people want you to do and it turns out people will pay you for that yeah I agree 100% And that's I guess what we've been missing for so long and I just hopefully we can get back to that point um I mean I know that the studio that's making Snow White is bent key which is like uh it seems to be like a children's um programming arm of like the daily wire so is this the first of the projects they're going to do are they going to do more things like this I hope I mean so we're totally looking at at a bunch of different films right now we have five original shows that on beny we have about 150 hours of kids programming and the pledge that we're making to parents because all of us our parents who founded the company the trium we all have a bunch of young kids and our pledge was we're not going to make anything that we ourselves would not be comfortable with putting our own kids in front of and we're not going to have anything on the platform that we wouldn't be pleased to have our own kids watch and so what that means is that even shows that we're licensing we're pre-screening every episode of those shows and if there was something that didn't meet our standards we were just taking that out so bent key really is is not political as much as it is just a safe place for kids to be able to watch material that's fun and adventurous and creative and doesn't wreck their childhood and we're not looking to insert political messages per se that the fact that it's apolitical is the political message it's you you can actually just abide by normal Traditional Values and not be insulted and your values insulted by material created by people who really don't like your values very much and that's that's the thing that we keep seeing over and over from kids programming is this attempt to insert these messages like why why just leave my kids it's one thing you want to do that to me I'm an adult I can choose what I want to watch or I don't want to watch what I don't need is my kid is watch watching some Show on Netflix that I do know is clean and the next thing that gets fed to them is some show that is a bunch of values that that I really don't agree with or values that that I don't particularly like and Disney just they can't stop themselves from doing it I mean I'm I don't know if you've seen the preview for for their new animated film wish um um so that's coming out I think in November around Thanksgiving and it seems again I'm just talking from from the trailer so maybe the trailer is is not a good depiction of what the film will be but it seems that the plot is very very very ly guys the the plot is essentially about how God is bad and so what it is it's a king and the King grants people's wishes but he but he is an apprentice and The Apprentice who's also learning to use this power of granting people's wishes finds out that the king is only selectively granting people's wishes and he's picking and choosing wish wishes this is a terrible terrible thing and she will grant everyone's wishes which I mean you don't have to go very far a field to understand what that kind of is is God is bad because he said no to you sometimes and so it' be better if there were an empowered female character who could get up and and make sure that that all wishes were granted across the board leading to what we would call the Bruce Almighty canone from which is you can't Grant everybody's wish all the time obviously but that doesn't seem to matter so okay no I mean it's um well essentially every movie that they put out um over the past year or two seems to have flopped you know clearly people are are put off by this brand now partly I guess because of um the political messaging partly like the poor writing U and partly just um maybe oversaturation in some cases like we've seen it with the with the Marvel movies like just endless superhero stuff just coming I think that also with the Marvel movies you're seeing a lot of the same things meaning that people liked the Marvel movies at the beginning because they actually like the characters that were created and now they've decided that those are not the characters they want to move forward with I mean the the person that nobody liked at all when it came out was was Captain Marvel Captain Marvel was boring because it's just a boring character I mean she can do literally everything and there are limit no limits on her abilities the rules of the universe don't apply to her and that destroys every plotline that you've ever had in the Marvel Universe but when you get rid of Robert Downey Jr and you just replace Robert Downey Jr with a more diverse person or because you need a more diverse person or when you take Thor and degrade Thor and now you're going to have female Thor or when you who who was on board for this I don't I don't even understand the logic of that if you've got a popular character the rule in Hollywood typically was you ride that character you ride that horse until it dies right if you got if you got Indiana Jones you ride Indiana Jones until Indiana Jones is 80 right which is what what they did which is what they're doing but they're not doing that in the Marvel Universe they're actually like killing off some of characters and substituting in their place not somebody who is going to mimic a lot of those moves but something different something creative put their own stamp on it it's like well I mean you can do that but you have to understand that you're insulting the core audience instead of just creating a new character who might actually be popular in their own right you're you're living off the legacy of the old character and using it as as a sort of jet fuel but it's not jet fuel it's actually sawdust in the in the in the engine it actually slows things people people don't like it when they feel insulted if you take if you take Iron Man you substitute somebody who's completely different from Iron Man and then call him Iron Man people don't like that in in virtually any context doesn't matter who even you're putting in but they've decided that they they have higher priorities apparently that make them feel good about themselves and it it's it's not working well yeah we see where it's LED and um I think it's the Assumption like you say that people audiences identify with the the superhero title you know whether it's Iron Man or whether it's Thor or whatever rather than the character behind it and by extension then the actor playing them um and the the feeling that you can just swap out these people and those that attachment will just transfer onto the new person it doesn't work like that I never did um but yeah I was going to ask as well like um obviously daily wire now are starting to get into movie production you know you've uh Snow White is obviously going to be a big one for next year but you've already done things like um Terror on the Prairie you've done shut in uh you um also put out um run hiide fight run hiide fight yeah I know you didn't make that one buted that one um yeah I mean obviously you're starting to to make a bit of an impact with this stuff yeah we're making a great aruan series that's going to be coming out next year the pen Dragon cycle and that's like our biggest budget thing that we've ever done that's being filmed right now I mean again our goal is that we're we're not going to have the budget of Disney I mean Disney spending a billion dollars a year on content we don't have that kind of budget but what we can do is provide things that don't insult our audience yeah and that that seems like a pretty good pitch I mean honestly it's funny when we first started the company we talked a lot about doing this sort of stuff Jeremy's chief goal in life was to make this sort of stuff when we first met and we became friends he wanted to make Hollywood films this is this has always been what he wanted to do he came out to Hollywood to make Hollywood films he's in writer rooms and he's friends with a lot of the stars and all this kind of stuff and that was never really my goal my goal was always more political it's what I do for a living but one of the things that we quickly realized is that if this ground was going to be seated like it was just going to be surrendered this ground of movies and TV shows that aren't going to insult you then now there's actually fertile ground right and so that that's why this no why thing works so perfectly because it's it's a perfect our audience needs us to signal to them that we're taking ground that has now been surrendered and when Disney publicly surrenders the ground it makes it a lot easier for us to say to our audience they surrendered the ground so we're going to take that ground as opposed to just you know putting out a nonpartisan piece of of entertainment where Hollywood hasn't really quite seated the ground publicly like we think that they have we think that they've abandoned the field but when they publicly abandon the field like that or when they make a movie like Lightyear and they decide they're just going to put a lesbian relationship in the middle of Lightyear in a movie for six-year-olds like you're you're saying the quiet part out loud now and and your your subtle moves are are well observed we can all see what you're doing and when you do that it's very easy for me and and our company to to say okay well here's an alternative you don't have to do that right if you want to see it go see it your your prerogative but here's something that is not going to be that and so again you know that that's sort of the the emo at the company make great content that also happens to to not insult the values of the people who watch it I know and it seems like such a simple formula and I said as much in my uh my video that I made about the the two Snow White movies essentially going head tohe head which isn't happening now because Disney maybe depends when you bring out our Snow White yeah exactly but it might give you an extra year if you wanted but um yeah I said you know the fundamental rule of business is like you give the customers what they're looking for and if you don't someone else will sooner or later and like seems like Disney with all these um fairy tale stories they insist on doing their own modern spin on it which you know people are increasingly turning against um it's only a matter of time until someone like there the daily comes in and says well okay we'll do it the way people want they're also I think Disney is making a critical mistake because I think that even if they assume that that people of Our Generation who now have kids and bring our kids to the movies that our generation is more liberal than our parents generation which socially is probably true even if you assume that you can't take the stuff that we grew up with and wreck it that's insulting to us right even even if we are as in general to the left of where our parents were at the same time in their lives we're not so far left that we want you to take all the things that we grew up with and just destroy them in front of us like that that's not pleasant it's unpleasant to watch and Disney has a nasty habit of doing that I I I don't know if to lack of creativity or or budgetary concerns me I know you've talked a lot about the budgetary concerns of of trying to you that's why they're using old IP and sort of gutting it um but it's whatever it is the first rule of of any business that requires an audience is do not insult your audience and Disney keeps insulting Their audience I think um Indiana Jones this year was just the ultimate example of that a movie that cost over $300 million to make um absolutely tanked at the box office no one wanted it they saw exactly what they were doing with this film um and it was a Shameless cash grab of an old IP to try and launch like a new character that no one liked and you know the the result is they they threw away hundreds of millions of dollars and you do Wonder like how long can they keep doing things like that I think they'd also blown out the the Indiana Jones IP over the over the shy lauff movie and all the rest of it I mean that like by the time they got to this one it felt like the IP itself was to tired to sustain the film I'll be honest with you I thought that the last 10 minutes of that film was quite lovely like the the last 10 minutes it's a very long film so there's a lot in the middle I didn't quite like but the last 10 minutes of the film that the sort of notion that he as a character who lost his son and Mar and they have to get back together having acknowledge their loss I thought that's was actually kind of a nice human moment but it's also the sign off for the character obviously and if you're going to sign off the character and you're going to hand it over to someone then it better be somebody who people like and this is like the second straight time that they've tried to hand it over to somebody that no one likes or you could just create a new character you know once in a while it' be okay I I I you know they've done other things with it they had the the young Indiana Jones um Chronicles like the TV show back in the 90s and that was that was pretty good fun you know like that allows you to have a I mean I think that Phoenix hadn't died they could have gone some places with it right I mean in in Last Crusade you lead off with with River Phoenix and you're like okay I could I could see this being a thing yeah right and and then it just obviously circumstances prevented that but yeah um but no honestly it's been been really interesting talking to you about like where you see um this whole like Endeavor going not just with Snow White but with the the whole idea of movie production TV shows and all that sort of thing and um I guess setting up a kind of um parallel U Marketplace to to what Hollywood's offering because you know going back to what I said it's it's very much they're not providing what people want well someone else will I think the market is also moving in our Direction in the sense that budgets are going to drop Hollywood's budgets are going to drop they do not have margins and they're losing subscribers and we are a fairly small company compared to them I me we're a nice siiz company we do you know $200 $250 million a year but we're not Disney which is doing tens of billions of dollars a year and so what that means is that for us to be in any way competitive budgets have to come down on the production of these sorts of things and budgets are going to come down because people ain't going to the movies anymore in the same way they were they're running out of subscribers that they can chisel and so there's a there that that's going to help us quite a lot and again they keep seeding all this popular ground I mean there was a point in time three years ago where they basically declared we're not making any more cop shows now if you're talking about like Staples of TV over the course of all of of History you're talking especially if you're talking about like early TV so I'm a student of early TV I wrote an entire book called prime time propag again about the history of the television industry and if if you look at like early TV pretty much everything was a cop procedural or a western those were like the two cheapest things to make a cop proced those are the two things you are not allowed to make in Hollywood now because Westerns are insulting to native peoples and because cops are inherently bad corrupt and and racist and so if you want to give me that if you want to like just give me those like two of the most productive lines of Television ever devised I'm happy to take that from you because it turns out people still like watching cop procedurals which is why CSI ran for literally ever and and people still like watching westerns which is why people love Yellowstone right so if you want if you want to give me those entire like just keep keep throwing at me all of your lucrative IP lines and we're happy to take them no I I think so and like honestly I I hope um I hope this movie turns out as good as people expect you know because it's got a lot of attention now uh when you've got these essentially two exactly the same movies going head-to-head um you know potentially now it's going to be different time periods when they come out but it's still people know about it I I would I would predict that we will uh that we we may move our release schedule Disney as a market as a marketing tool I I just just going to put that out there you'll have a choice I think when Disney's movie comes out between Disney's Snow White and and our Snow White yeah but I I just uh yeah hopefully it's um I think a lot of people we want it to be good we want it to be good we don't want we want to make CP not be a gimmick essentially like oh we're just doing this because Disney are doing it you yeah we're not going to go on back lot somewhere and and CGI a bunch of bad animation and put in the background like that that is not what we're we're here to do the one thing that I think that even our critics acknowledge is that the movies that we've independently produced are very good-looking movies yeah like what what whether you like them or not like in terms of production value the production value on ter on the Prairie is very very high the production value on Shu in is very very high these look like Studio films and and so we're very concerned with things looking like they should look so we don't we don't want our viewers to have to sacrifice okay I don't like the values of Disney so I'm going to watch this like really crappy Snow White that looks bad and has bad music and no one can act like I'm not I'm not going to get like Jeremy is really really firmly focused on quality at all turns he has been since we launched the company which is why if you look even at our early podcast he was like we're going to have high def cameras we're going to build sets and it's going to look really really good and I was like who cares it's a podcast he's like no no it has to look really really good and so this is production value has always been one of the core component of the success of the company and is there any chance at all you could get Peter dlit a role as one of the dwars can you uh well honestly thank you for for taking the time to explain some of this stuff and give people a bit of insight into what you're doing with this because a lot of people are interested in this movie they'll be interested to see where it goes so I really appreciate and again shout out to my business partners Kaleb Robinson and and really Jeremy boring who are really the guys who are doing the hard work I just to get to come out and talk about it nice one man thank you and well that's all I've got for today so go away now

Channel: Critical Drinker After Hours

Views: 878,675

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Id: N5jViRrsYyY

Length: 23min 54sec (1434 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 05 2023