With a new month comes new Netflix offerings, and among the streaming service’s new pieces of original content coming out in September is a French-language movie titled Cuties. Netflix recently started promoting the movie, which included dropping a poster that has received a lot of criticism recently, with some people accusing it of sexualizing children.
As a result, Netflix has taken down the Cuties poster and responded to the backlash with the following statement:
We're deeply sorry for the inappropriate artwork that we used for Mignonnes/Cuties. It was not OK, nor was it representative of this French film which won an award at Sundance. We’ve now updated the pictures and description.
To provide some context, Cuties is a coming-of-age drama movie that follows Amy, an 11-year-old girl who joins a group of dancers at school known as the “Cuties” and rapidly becomes aware of her burgeoning femininity, upsetting her mother and her values in the process. Cuties was directed and written by Maïmouna Doucouré, with this marking her feature directorial debut after previously helming and penning the short film Maman(s).
Cuties premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and Berlin Film Festival earlier this year and was met with a lot positive reception, with the movie already boasting an 82% score on Rotten Tomatoes. So Cuties kicked off 2020 with some great press, but this latest talk is most definitely the opposite of that. A Change.org petition was even started in response to the controversial poster calling for Cuties to be removed from Netflix, and at the time of this writing, it’s collected over 84,000 signatures.
In case you missed the Cuties poster that caught all this flak, take a look at it below compared to the movie’s original French poster, and you'll notice there’s definitely a considerable difference in tone:
To reiterate, the Cuties poster on the right has been removed from Netflix’s promotional campaign, and if you want a more accurate idea of what the movie has to offer, watch the trailer below:
Even with all those positive reviews from professional critics, it’s hard to say how the general public will feel about Cuties, and whether this controversy over the poster will impact its viewership, despite Netflix having already played damage control. In any case, as mentioned earlier, Cuties is just one of the original movies Netflix movies will provide to subscribers in September, with others including Love, Guaranteed, I’m Thinking Of Ending Things, The Devil All The Time and Enola Holmes.
Stay tuned to CinemaBlend for all the latest and greatest Netflix news, both on the movies and television front. And for those of you curious about what’s supposed to come out in theaters later this year, you can find that information in our 2020 release schedule.
