Hacker Cinema
Snow White
2025 · Film · 109 min
Directed by Marc Webb
Following the benevolent King's disappearance, the Evil Queen dominated the once fair land with a cruel streak. Princess Snow White flees the castle when the Queen, in her jealousy over Snow White's inner beauty, tries to kill her. Deep into the dark woods, she stumbles upon seven magical dwarves and a young bandit named Jonathan. Together, they strive to survive the Queen's relentless pursuit and aspire to take back the kingdom.
10 negative15 neutralfrom 25 commenters
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26 comments on Hacker News
That’s not accurate. All the Disney interpretations of pre-existing fairy tales also have takes by others, whether books, theatrical adaptations, or even movies! Take Snow White as an example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_White
So I’d be curious to hear about a counter example.
> Disney did not create Snow White, Bambi, Robin Hood, or Peter Pan.
I believe I stated above that I support reducing copyright periods (to the lifetime of the original author would be appropriate IMO, if the copyright is held by an individual, and I would be open to a more aggressive schedule for corporate copyrights). AFAIK all of Disney's adaptations of these stories would be allowed under that rule; some of these original stories are centuries old. But no, I don't think Disney should be able to immediately adapt a book I've written and not give me a cent out of the billions they will make off the adaptation. I would sell more books that way, sure---except I actually wouldn't, because in that world I have also lost the ability to monetize my work. So it's more accurate to say that somebody else would sell more of my books, or that I would give away more of my books.
And yes, it's more appropriate to call these adaptations. Fan fiction is more in the vein of original stories using (somebody else's) established characters and settings.
> To a large degree individual artists do not hold copyright for their work, they often sign it away (especially musicians and authors) in exchange for signing, advances, and distribution.
"To a large degree" is obviously meaningless, but a good author's agent will retain your core copyright and other rights (e.g. film adaptation, publishing/distribution in other countries, etc.).
> I think they will still be financed. Take books, I don't think bookstores will want to vertically integrate from book discovery through printing and retail stores. Consumers will still need ways to identify reputable book publishers to limit what they purchase next.
You are conflating production and distribution. If there is no copyright, the second a single copy of a work becomes available it will be scraped and offered by every distribution platform in the business, who are all free to curate their "storefronts" however they please. The difference is that they don't have to pay a cent for production, royalties, or anything else.
As an example, say I publish a new short story on my Patreon, which I use to support my writing---the idea being that if people want to read my shorts they have to pay for access. In this new regime, that newly posted story is going to appear on Amazon and every other big platform within hours, for cheaper than my Patreon membership or even free. And if I am an established name, there is no reason Amazon can't put my book front and center in their KDP feeds, etc.
The same goes for any other publishing model. The author and publisher (if applicable) immediately lose all ability to get a return on their investment, except to the extent that they can organically attract people to the correct listing on the correct distribution platform, which will have to be price-competitive with other listings.
It's the same story for paper books, too. B&N can just print copies of my book and display it front and center in their stores, without even asking me, and certainly without paying me anything.
And the same goes for other types of media. Why wouldn't it? This is why I say the commodity slop is all that will be left---that kind of IP synergizes best with the massive marketing efforts and platform consolidation that will be required to recoup your investments in content. Not much might even change in that world.
> The 0.00001$ per stream for musicians? Or the 1$ residual checks for reruns?
There is always going to be a long tail, and there are always going to be great artists who go unrecognized and unrewarded. It's also true that monolithic modern platforms like Spotify are going to leverage their position as gatekeepers to squeeze artists as far as possible. But it's ignorant (or possibly disingenuous, and anyway categorically incorrect) to claim that the above means nobody is getting paid substantial amounts for their work via these mechanisms. I suggest you seek out the authors of some of your favorite recent novels (if you read) and ask them whether losing royalties would have a substantial impact on their finances and ability to keep writing.
> You can just go write your own fiction, right now. You can invent your own original characters and setting and plot and go write it. You will automatically own the copyright to your own work; there is no other party who must "bless" your efforts.
I keep going back to the old-school Disney example because it's easiest to see: Disney did not create Snow White, Bambi, Robin Hood, or Peter Pan. All of those movies are highly influential and core to Disney and the culture of people growing up with them. And they're all fan fiction, or would be considered as such, and be impossible to produce and monetize if Disney had to live with the same copyright restrictions they impose on the rest of us.
If I want to now go and recreate my own movie based on one of the original texts, I think it would be next to impossible since the threat of lawsuit (even if I use none of their IP and would eventually win) would make financing impossible.
Fan fiction has been turned into an edge case by the current copyright system. Putting your own spin on the stories you grew up with used to be the norm.
> my specific concern is for individual artists who hold the rights to their work
To a large degree individual artists do not hold copyright for their work, they often sign it away (especially musicians and authors) in exchange for signing, advances, and distribution.
> what effect do you think abolishment of copyright will have on the production of films that are actually good? Who will finance them when it's impossible to directly monetize them?
I think they will still be financed. Take books, I don't think bookstores will want to vertically integrate from book discovery through printing and retail stores. Consumers will still need ways to identify reputable book publishers to limit what they purchase next.
> I think commodity slop will be the only thing that gets funded anymore
One could argue that this is what has always dominated funding. Most revenue and shows have been for artistically devoid pieces of media (especially in movies).
> No artists are relying on royalties and similar payments for their work.
The 0.00001$ per stream for musicians? Or the 1$ residual checks for reruns?
Why can’t we have original stories(I.e Sinners, Black Panther, White Lotus) and instead try to make White Snow black or whatever and paint people racist? I get that people want to make these stories more inclusive but the characters are just too powerful to change them and not expect a backlash.
People prefer new characters or “staying true to the original story/character” instead of lazy remixes.
Or you can create your own remix with AI now. Feed the movie and make the characters as you want. The result may seem a bit weird(i.e like a Snow White being a fat black gay male) for a fan of the movie/character but for you as an activist it will check the marks you are looking for. Just don’t invoke racism if people won’t like your AI slop.
>The entertainment CEOs in charge would happily enshittify to stream AI slop with no workers if they thought they could get away with it
You're missing the point of my argument again and moving the frame of the discussions to random tangents you make up, but don't disprove what I'm saying.
Let me disprove your point AGAIN, this time with numbers. According to my Google-Fu, 2000-3000 people worked on making the Matrix in 1999, while today Disney employs 4000-6000 people for their shitty Marvel movies or remakes like snow white.
So no, the enshitification is not due to execs cutting workers, since more people work today on blockbuster movies than before, while quality is more shit.
The enshitification is because the people they employ now are either incompetent or malicious.
To be fair to Wright, there were a bunch of big budget movies in 2025 that flopped: Thunderbolts, Tron Ares, Snow White, etc. There’s definitely a wider phenomenon at work of cinema struggling in general. But I agree, Wright’s big-budget career is likely over.
>Disney/WB regularly make hundreds of millions of USD on their high budget movies.
Not when they loose hundreds of millions. Snow White just lost Disney about 150 million.
>A view is worth less than $1.
Yes, and they get hundreds of million of views and failures don't cast anything since they don't need to keep cinemas open.
I constantly wonder why no one's talking about the fact that almost every movie with cgi visual effects looks awful these days? I was on a plane recently. One person in front of me had Wicked on, another the live-action Snow White, another some recent Marvel movie. Each slid completely into the uncanny valley in their own way. It was really eye opening.
The era you're talking about the balance was spot on. I'd say there was a golden age of effects from Star Wars through to Terminator 2. You're already suspending your disbelief and letting the filmmaker take you on a ride. Who cares if it's hyper-realistic? (or, in the case of contemporary movies, trying to be hyper-realistic and failing to the point that it makes it even more obvious.)
Yeah, people underestimate how hard it is to get a movie into a theatre AND get people to pay for a ticket.
Hollywood can barely get any well made movies past $100 million these days unless it's based on some well known franchise (minecraft, Captain America, Snow White) or it has some well known actor.
> Nearly every movie released by a major studio in the past year based on an original script or a little-known book has been a box-office disappointment. Before this weekend’s flops were Warner Bros. Discovery’s “Mickey 17” and “The Alto Knights,” Paramount’s “Novocaine,” Apple’s “Fly Me to the Moon,” Amazon’s “Red One,” and the independently financed “Horizon: An American Saga Chapter 1” and “Megalopolis.”
These were all bad movies (Below 7 on IMDB), including "Drop". Most had a redeeming feature though.
The problem is multiverse that's bad still does OK, "Snow White" hopefully will make a loss but it's still pulled in $181 million so far.
2024 Box Office, hard to find an independent movie too low - https://www.boxofficemojo.com/year/world/2024/
"Juror #2" is probably the worst as a solid movie for the genre and probably Clint Eastwood's last. It was mistreated by Warner Bros.
> Go watch CGI in a movie theatre and it's worse than 20 years ago, go home to play video games and the new releases are all remasters of 20 year old games because no-one knows how to do anything any more.
None of the things you said are actually true. Only superficially, because you've only seen those mass market crap.
Good movies are still around, and yuo don't even notice the CGI, because they're cleverly done. For crap like the recently released snow white, it's obvious that the CGI is badly done - it doesn't make it an indictment against all movies released of late!
Same with games - just because there's lots of AAA studio flops that look terrible, doesn't mean the medium is all terrible. There's so many good indie games that you can never truly play them all.
But if your exposure to these products are only the mass market crap, then you might certainly feel that way.
Check out how Snow White has been going. The film industry is absolutely there, but the good news is it's going exactly as horribly as you predicted.
>Antman, Indiana Jones, Wish, all had white main characters,
DEI doesn't just affect main characters. See who were tasked to write and direct those movies and the DEI agendas they're forced to push. Clueless people with other flops under their belt, who got the projects out of DEI so Disney can look inclusive on social media.
And speaking of Indiana Jones, that flopped because they shoved a strong independent Girl Boss™ with an annoying personality to replace the beloved Indie as the main character who got sidelined in his own movie. It flopped because people go to an Indian Jones film to see Indie, not Fleabag. If you disrespect the fans they won't watch your movie.
Same stuff with Star Wars where Disney shoved Rey the super-powerful Girl Boss™ to replace Luke Skywalker the old and useless CIS white Jedi, and defeat all other evil white men in the movie by herself with her magic powers. Same with Marvel, Snow White, Little Mermaid and every other of Disneys trash remakes that are all about DEI instead of entertainment.
People go to see movies to get entertained. If you fail to entertain them because you wish instead to push DEI agendas on them, they won't pay for your content and you will lose money and ultimately your shareholders won't be happy and the free market will eventually correct this, so at least capitalism has some upsides.
See here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_k8cDLe-Kk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6E6wJpu0A8E
At risk? They haven’t had hit movie for years. They have destroyed just about everything they’ve touched, from Indiana Jones to Star Wars to Snow White.
Just to be clear: Disney is trying to stop their own unique creations from becoming public domain while they are still acting using those creations.
The public domain works like Snow White and Cinderella were hundreds of years old when Disney made their versions, and they have no issues with others making their own versions of these fairy tales (because there is only one "Disney's Snow White").
And Disney is perfectly fine with paying for the rights to IP to adapt into films, as with Alice in Wonderland, the MCU, etc.
The word "meaningfully" was there for a reason.
Yes, obviously, there's someone buying it when they release it. But even in Marvel's current anemic state I doubt sales of Snow White reaches even .1% of the revenue from The Marvels, a single movie. Their revenue on direct sales of stuff about to go public domain is a rounding error, and nowhere near enough to justify locking up the entire rest of the nation's culture just for that.
Further evidence that it must not be that big a deal is that the Mouse seems to have finally relented and doesn't seem to be lobbying for more extensions anymore.
I'm also almost certain that Disney makes obvious, controversial decisions for the free marketing that comes from outrage. The common sentiment is that Disney does race swapping and alters source material in ways to pander to a very loud and righteous 2-dimensional audience, but I'm pretty sure they're really trying to antagonize the opposite audience, who will tweet angrily and start an online flame war that is free marketing for the movie.
And it kind of works, for example all the controversy around Snow White is the only reason I've heard of it.
Either you are living under a rock, are being purposely obtuse, or support the politics being pushed so you either do not see it or just willfully ignore it.
>There was no campaign speech to elect Biden in the latest Captain America
This is just a stupid statement
>I don't recall anything overtly political in most modern movies.
Snow White, Indian Jones 5, Just about Every Marvel Movie Past infinity War, 2 of the 3 Star Wars Films in the new Trilogy, The Little Mermaid... Shall I go on?
It is more pronounced in TV Shows however, She Hulk, Season 2 and 3 of Witcher, Rings of Power, etc etc etc
>So what exact "narratives" is everyone complaining about?
For starters [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPE7-PRL0M8
This that just just the tip of the ice berg...
Perjury is fairly a steep evidential climb because it inquires as to what the accused believed, and it wouldn't apply here anyway because the DMCA specifically applies perjury to the question of authorisation to act for the owner. It does not apply to the other information.
If I claim to be Disney and issue a DMCA takedown of somebody's video, that's perjury, because Disney did not authorize me to do that.
If Disney's lawyers claim your video about how much you enjoy yoga is infringing on their animated feature film "Snow White" that's not perjury even though the claim is wrong and the worst that'll happen is if it went to court it gets dismissed and maybe a Disney lawyer gets slapped on the wrist for wasting a judge's time with this nonsense.
My first association was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_White, the second https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifeforce_(film)
As in https://cdn.flickeringmyth.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/lifeforce-3-2.jpg
:-)
The problem is that for game ROMs specifically, opening them to the public domain devalues potential opportunities for re-releases and remasters. The Nintendo virtual console service and S/NES classic are prominent examples. So it isn't so simple that there is "no harm done" by forcing game ROMs to fall into public domain.
That all being said, I still agree with you. I really don't care how much money Nintendo, Microsoft, or Sony wants to make on decades-old games, at a certain point it becomes a cultural artifact. Snow White and other century-old movie properties should be public domain nowadays as well. At this point we're debating about the core values of trademark law though, and I'm not sure you wanted to do that.
A similar debate revolves around what the law should say about "dead" games. These are games that, for example, rely on a central server that has been shut down. Many of these games were incredibly popular in their day, and some "radicals" (like myself, lol) argue that game companies should be compelled to release the server source code in an effort to preserve the game. Here's a great overview/rant on this topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUAX0gnZ3Nw
Derivative works of expired copyrights, yes. Disney doesn't own the plot to Snow White and never has because the Snow White story is in the public domain. Movies in the public domain can be reproduced in full or in part (as you mention, an exact copy) and the plot/storylines can be copied but Disney has a solid trademark claim on their characters. And that trademark claim continues indefinitely so long as Disney continues to use those characters in the marketplace.
If you make a cartoon using Mickey Mouse will reasonable consumers falsely attribute that cartoon to Disney? Yes. That cartoon would likely cause confusion in the market place. Mickey Mouse is inextricably linked to Disney in the consumer's mind. You cannot use the Mickey Mouse character even if you never claim to be Disney. Further, I would argue that you cannot use the character even if you explicitly state you are not Disney because Disney's primary consumers are children and even with a disclaimer the mere use of the mark would likely cause consumer confusion.
Old movies, cartoons and comic books are not commercially attractive enough to keep fighting for those originals. Disney can make new Snow White and make hundreds of millions on this release, so what's the point in costly lobbying for a fraction of that revenue?
facebook used to let you do direct knowledge graph searches
"restaurants liked by people who like Joe's Pancakes and Green Dragon Mexican Pizza"
"movies liked by people who are friends with people who like Back to the Future and Arrested Development"
"people who live nearby and like Green Dragon Mexican Pizza and Arrested Development"
"friends of friends of friends who like Arrested Development and Joe's Pancakes"
"Friends of Megan Albert friends who are women named "Erin" Chipotle employ"
I think you can see why they removed it.
this URL might lead to something like "restaurants liked by people who like Snow White" https://www.facebook.com/search/130104022710/likers/pages-liked/273819889375819/places/intersect/
"How does it not encourage creativity?"
Creativity comes in many forms. It can include a reinterpretation of existing material. Walt Disney films like Snow White were based on materials from the public domain. Were they uncreative for having not come up with a completely new story?
The book series "Wicked" is a very popular revisionist telling of the original Wizard of Oz books. The copyright for the books (but not the movie!) lapsed just months after L Frank Baum's literary estate had come out of copyright. (Gregory Maguire, the author of Wicked, had thought it was decades out of copyright when he started writing the book.)
It's impossible to tell a revisionist story without having some story to revise. Do you really believe that Maguire was less creative with Wicked than if he had written some other series entirely? If copyright were 10 years longer and so he needed to get a license from the estate, would you say he was less creative?
Similarly, a commercial parody like "Pretty Woman" requires something to parody, like "Oh, Pretty Woman", and it makes little sense to parody something that no one knows anything about.
[For the record, my intent wasn't that I'd pretend I was the original author, just that I'd sell the transcribed book. But running with your take on this anyway, and with the usual IANAL disclaimer:]
Morally, you're certainly right: it's wrong to take credit for work that is not your own. But legally, I thought this is precisely what "public domain" means. Disney can make a movie out of Snow White without bothering to credit the Brothers Grimm (or their sources) at all, much less needing permission from their heirs. Public domain works can be used by anyone, in any way, for any purpose.
As one example to illustrate this, Creative Commons provides a way to "dedicate work to the public domain". Their human-readable summary says,
"You can copy, modify, distribute and perform the work, even for commercial purposes, all without asking permission."
That's pretty much what I was attempting to describe in my previous comment.