Believe it or not, there was a brief period in the early 2010s when Disney wasn’t the only studio cannibalizing classic fairy tales for inspiration, even if Snow White and the Huntsman proved to be about the only one that broke out from the pack to become a box office hit.
Tarsem Singh’s Mirror, Mirror, Tommy Wirkola’s Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters, Catherine Hardwicke’s Red Riding Hood, and Bryan Singer’s Jack the Giant Slayer hardly made much of an impact either individually or collectively, leaving Rupert Sanders’ reinvention to shoulder a lot of the burden alone.
Thanks to a theatrical run that yielded $397 million and a pair of Academy Award nominations, it proved to be a fruitful endeavor, but it would also be not unfair to suggest the longest-lasting legacy of Snow White and the Huntsman was the off-camera affair between the filmmaker and star Kristen Stewart.
Not only did it usher in the end of the latter’s relationship with Robert Pattinson, but Sanders’ wife filed for divorce several months after the film was released, and the do-over’s miserable legacy was compounded when Universal offloaded the distribution rights to sequel Winter’s War and was made to look like a genius by comparison when it tanked horrendously.
Scandalous headlines aside, effects-heavy epics always have a habit of enticing Netflix subscribers to give them a shot, with the remarkably unexciting Snow White and the Hunstman the latest beneficiary after FlixPatrol named it as one of the streaming service’s top-viewed titles following its return to the library.