The article does talk about why labor overseas is cheaper. Twice, in fact:

Labor costs in countries where the government pays for health care are often far lower than anywhere in the United States, particularly in California.

One budget document viewed by The New York Times showed the cost of a seven-person set operations team — positions known as “grips” — to be roughly $59,000 for a 30-day shoot in Budapest.

Because of health care, pension and other expenses, it costs about $53,000 to employ just one senior-level grip in Los Angeles for the same time frame,

The US really needs to de-couple healthcare from employment.

Asides from healthcare being a basic human need, it’s a drag on our economy.

As the article says, there are still original distribution prints from 1977 out there, squirreled away in private print collections.

So they might be dragging one of those out for this showing.

As for the original negatives… only Lucas knows.

But who’s going to believe that this will be the original original?

London only. Fuck.

Apparently all works from 1929 entered the public domain starting in January 1st 2025:

https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2025/

12 more Mickey Mouse shorts, and the 1929 version of Popeye!

Wikipedia to the rescue!

It’s not a complete list but…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_in_the_public_domain_in_the_United_States

You can sort the table by release year.

Some more recent movies entered the public domain because of failure to display copyright, or failure to renew copyright.

Apparently Debbie Does Dallas is now public domain!

There’s a school of acting where you’re supposed to more-or-less keep a blank face, and let the audience project emotions onto your protagonist. Richard Gere was famous for it. I want to say it’s Method Acting, but that’s not it.

It doesn’t work if the writing doesn’t work.

Upon reflection, one of the concept mistakes was slavishly following the original plot.

The embellishments like the happy citizens, Evil Queen’s love for cheap plastic jewels, apple pies, etc. just felt unnecessary and tacked on.

Disney already made Maleficent relatively recently in 2014 as a meta take on the original, so where could they go from there?

I think in this case, Godot was miscast.

I understand any actress wanting to expand their range, particularly her wanting to be known anything else other than Wonder Woman. See Leonard Nimoy and his “I’m not Spock” phase.

Sometimes, you just gotta own it tho…

A friend who watched Snow White with me thought she was okay, but I didn’t think she sold being EVIL enough.

But the sakuga fight scene against the freaky ninja inmates made up for it.

You’d think they could have done better than the bad CG dragon though.

None of this would be a problem if Disney had made a good movie.

But Disney didn’t.

Zegler is a talented young actress and singer, has had notable roles already, and will continue to have a great career.

Gal Godot has been a great Wonder Woman.

Both are good, regardless of what they post on social media.

The script, production and whole concept of this movie had far worse problems than Zegler and Godot.

Creepy dwarfs? Cheap looking plastic jewels? Boring script? Bad dance numbers? Bad music?

Were Zegler and Godot responsible for all of those?

Releasing the movie to influencers would NOT have helped the word-of-mouth. You have to make a good movie to begin with for that to work.

Disney doesn’t even care to make a movie that is good enough to make money.

It’s about exercising their IP of “Snow White movie” so that their copyright doesn’t expire, so that others can’t make their own “Snow White movie” even though the German fairytale Snow White by the Brothers Grimm is in the public domain.

Well, they can but they can’t use Disney Snow White’s iconic dress, and anything resembling the dwarves, for example, or anything that could possibly resemble anything that happens in the Disney movies.

I was completely bored, shifting restlessly in my seat from about 20 minutes in.

There’s no emotional depth to the characters and the happy little kingdom setting. They’re supposed to be who they are because that’s who they say they are.

The apple pie thing…

There’s no wordplay around “fair” having separate meanings of both “beautiful” and “just”, but both meanings are used in a jumble. As if the writers started to put some wordplay in, but abandoned the project halfway through.

The dwarves looked creepy, particularly Dopey who doesn’t look like the other dwarves at all, and also falls into that uncanny valley who is not quite unbelievable enough looking to avoid looking creepy, if that makes sense.

There is a cool subplot that I did like…

Gal Godot hamming it up as the Evil Queen didn’t quite work for me. Some actors just can’t do evil. A friend who watched this with me thought that she was okay though.

I did notice a long list of “greens” credits, i.e. plant handling. Maybe Disney should have spent some of that money on writers instead.

This feels like one of those half hearted productions just to renew the copyright, i.e. to prevent Spinal Tap from going into the public domain, the rights-owning entity has to use the IP every few decades in order to maintain private ownership.

Dr. Evil: “One billion dollars!”

Everyone else: “Haha, nobody’s going to pay that much for… Oh wait…”