In the last post, I talked about how I saw a "black-centric" Couple's Retreat commercial during "The Cleveland Show." Surely an isolated case of individualized programming, right? No movie would dare to launch a series of racially-specific promos - the backlash would be too big a concern.
Well, take a look at this. This is the U.S. poster for the movie:
Faizon Love and Kali Hawk are waaaay in the back, but they are technically in the poster. You might say "well, that's just the way they took the picture." That's not the case - each of these couples are shot individually, and then digitally inserted. So a producer somewhere had to say "let's see how far back into the poster we can put these guys."
Interesting note: Hawk's name is on the top part of the poster, but not in the credits on the bottom.
Alright, that was the U.S poster, and last month they released an international poster:
It's a smart decision to cut the black people out, because everyone knows that the rest of the world is racist.
Now, we can explain all this away fairly easily, because after all, Love and Hawk are the 8th and 9th least famous people in this movie (actually, when you count cameos, they're probably even lower than that), so it makes sense to cut them out of the international poster.
What makes it stand out is that they've kept up a Vince Vaughn-Jason Bateman-Jon Favreau-Malin Akerman-centric line of advertising on every "white" TV show on television, and then created ads that make it look like the black actors are the main characters for all the "black" shows. Then they assumed that no white people would watch the black shows, and vice versa, so no one would know what they were doing.
It's really just kind of insulting to everyone involved.