A good portion of the 2014 dramedy Pride - which was very recently nominated for Best Picture, Musical or Comedy Golden Globe - centers on the mid-1980s fight for equality for gays, lesbians, and transgenders in U.K., but that's not something you'd not necessarily get while reading about the film on its DVD case. As it turns out, CBS Film has actually edited out all references to homosexuality on the package, in both text and image form.
This news was first reported by Pink News, which has noted strange differences between the CBS's marketing materials for director Matthew Warchus' Pride and what actually appears on its home video release cover. To start, I'd point your attention to the image above, which you'll note has a large banner reading "Lesbians & Gays Support The Miners" behind a throng of activists. Now compare that same image to the one that appears on the DVD cover:
Taking a more through look at this artwork, you'll also notice that the plot description also leaves out any and all references to homosexuality. The main characters are identified as "a group of London-based activists," but their central cause is left a mystery. Meanwhile, the official CBS Films website has the following as the official synopsis for Pride:
PRIDE is inspired by an extraordinary true story. It’s the summer of 1984, Margaret Thatcher is in power and the National Union of Mineworkers is on strike, prompting a London-based group of gay and lesbian activists to raise money to support the strikers’ families.Initially rebuffed by the Union, the group identifies a tiny mining village in Wales and sets off to make their donation in person. As the strike drags on, the two groups discover that standing together makes for the strongest union of all.
CBS Films is apparently now "looking into" why all references to homosexuality were removed from the DVD artwork, but there's no word yet if they actually plan to do anything about it once the reasoning is rooted out.
So why was this done? Certainly a factor has to be the fact that homosexuality is an unfortunately controversial subject matter in the United States, and it's very possible that CBS was just trying to avoid it in promotion of Pride. Of course, now it seems that trying to skirt one controversy has just resulted in a completely different one. All in all, the whole thing is rather ridiculous, and hopefully once the studio figures out what happens, they will re-do the film's packaging and market it as it should be marketed.
