Fans customized the Wicked movie poster to more closely match the original Broadway poster.

Original Broadway Poster:

Movie poster:

Some fans, disappointed by the poster, altered it to be closer to the original, moving Grande’s hand and lowering the brim of Erivo’s hat to cover her eyes. The edits prompted Erivo to respond. “This is the wildest, most offensive thing I have seen

“None of this is funny. None of it is cute. It degrades me. It degrades us,” Erivo continued. “The original poster is an ILLUSTRATION. I am a real life human being, who chose to look right down the barrel of the camera to you, the viewer… because, without words we communicate with our eyes.”

So, this seems like a completely reasonable reaction to fans making fan content.

  • bigbrowncommie69 [any]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    24
    arrow-down
    3
    ·
    1 month ago

    Yeah unless there’s any black women who want to educate us on the reality that black women have been historically had their eyes erased or something, this is just fucking weird.

    They didn’t even like try to edit her to make her “more white” or something, like in terms of her facial features.

    Sometimes people are seriously just oversensitive and looking for enemies where there are none.

    • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.techOP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      15
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      1 month ago

      As a white person I’m definitely not the one to say if that’s bad or not - but yeah that would be 100% a teaching moment - because I am not aware of anything like that. Instead of slamming down the hammer of “most offensive thing I’ve ever seen” for what I can only see as a fan poster that’s mimicing one that already exists she could have said something like “I understand why they did this, but here is why I disagree with it”. Personally as a fan of wicked, I was disappointed by the poster. Not enough to make my own, but the original poster was iconic to me.

      • Todd Bonzalez@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        1 month ago

        She says “this degrades me, this degrades us”, and while I may be misreading what the means here, I interpreted “us” to mean “Black people”. Though it is vague wording so I can’t say for certain…

    • Dragonstaff@leminal.space
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      arrow-down
      14
      ·
      1 month ago

      How specifically similar to this instance does the erasure of Black women need to be? Yes, Black women are dehumanized all the time. It’s common for movies to turn Black people into animals and objectify Black women in any number of ways.

      That is what is offensive about the fan edit. In the original movie poster she is a person. Her eyes are meant to connect with the viewer. The fan edit specifically takes that away from her.