“‘Mirror Mirror’: What happened to the fairy-tale renaissance?”

Steve Zeitchik in yesterday’s LA Times:

This was supposed to be the era of the fairy-tale movie. Big studios threw big money at big stars to take us to the land of happily ever after. In part, this was — let’s be honest — because the source material came cheap. But it was also happening for all sorts of cultural reasons, we were told, a metaphor for evil and escape in a post-9/11 world, children’s folklore with a Christopher Nolan spin.

Yet like Cinderella’s slippers on the other women, none of them have quite fit. In fact, fairy-tale movies so far have been dismal commercial and creative affairs. This past weekend’s “Mirror Mirror,” starring Lily Collins as the put-upon princess Snow White, was the latest such disappointment — a paltry $19-million opening, just a 53% favorable rating on Movie Review Intelligence. And though you can toss out specific reasons for its failure (mistimed marketing, the diminishing appeal of Julia Roberts), it’s starting to feel like something larger is going on here.

This must be confusing in the halls of Hollywood studio offices.

Aren’t fairy tales the quintessential in pre-branded brands, passed down from generation to generation?

Aren’t they by definition of four-quadrant, appealing to both genders and all ages?

Can’t we assume a fairy tale’s story has a certain reliable resonance to it if it has appealed to people century after century?

So why the hell are these fairy tale redo’s becoming undo’s?

Two things.

First just because a story is a myth doesn’t mean a movie iteration of it will necessarily come across as mythic. Most fairy tales have a mystery about them and traffic in classic archetypes, both of which can translate into deep, multilayered emotional and psychological responses. In producing movies that aim for the widest possible audience, studios will often find themselves scaling back both mystery and archetypes out of fear those will shut out some target demos and confuse others. What you end up with is a shell of a myth without a soul.

I ask you, which comes across as more mythic. This:

Or this:

Second I’m sure somebody along the line in the development of Mirror, Mirror thought the idea of bending the classic version of the Snow White character into, as Zeitchik calls it, a “bouncy, punny, girl-empowerment story” was a good one. If movies today can turn Sherlock Holmes into a superhero, Abraham Lincoln into a vampire hunter, and Edgar Alan Poe into a sleuth extraordinaire, why not Snow White: Modern Girl? One small problem: The former are all action movies, the moviegoer knows what they are going to get:

With something like Mirror, Mirror — “A classic tale with a new wrinkle” — what exactly is it?

At a deeper level, what we are seeing is two takes on storytelling going in different directions:

With these latest movie iterations of Sherlock Holmes, Abraham Lincoln, Edgar Alan Poe and all the rest, we see literary and historical figures being mythologized into fairy tales.

With movies like Mirror, Mirror, we see fairy tales being demythologized into pop culture.

Box office results ought to tell convincingly which approach has a stronger resonance with movie audiences.

For more of Zeitchik’s article, go here.

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