Kristen S

Studio: Universal Pictures
Opening: June 1, 2012; previously Dec. 21, 2012
Filming starts: The second week of August in London and Wales
Director: Rupert Sanders, a Brit known for cutting-edge video games
Tone: Swashbuckling. "It's an epic treatment of the material," says producer Joe Roth.
Plot: The evil queen hires a huntsman to assassinate her stepdaughter, Snow White, so she can rule the land. Instead, he joins forces with the fair maiden.
The dwarfs: There are eight, named after Roman leaders including Caesar, Tiberius and Nero. Special effects will be used to change the dimensions of average-height actors.

Dueling 'Snow Whites': This battle isn't pretty

You don't need a magic mirror to know that this Brothers Grimm heroine is the fairest of all the storybook characters being recruited for the coming blizzard of live-action movies and TV series based on fairy tales. The raven-haired, ruby-lipped beauty figures prominently in ABC's new fall series "Once Upon a Time". Disney, whose 1937 animated masterpiece "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" remains the standard against which all others are measured, has a martial-arts makeover set in China in the wings.

But most of the attention has been focused on the saga of the two dueling Snow White movies that are set to awaken in theaters next year.

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Producer Joe Roth, who describes "Snow White and the Huntsman" as a swashbuckler akin to "Pirates of the Caribbean", says the initial date change came about because "it felt like a summer movie, like an old-fashioned Disney action adventure."

He's not too rattled that Universal's attempt to open first was thwarted by Relativity. The former Disney exec went through the same thing in 1998, when "Armageddon" faced off with another disaster flick, Paramount's "Deep Impact", which had opened two months earlier.

"Audiences went to both," Roth says, and "Armageddon" did considerably better at the box office - $202 million compared with $140.5 million - even though it opened second.

Roth is resigned that his "Snow White" is staying put: "I'd like to tell you it is coming out this Christmas, but that's not happening."