I’ll just say it: It was truly frightening to see Blake Lively’s character in “It Ends With Us” get pushed down the stairs, sexually assaulted and slapped in a movie she had promoted months earlier with the line “Grab your friends, wear your florals and head out to see it!”
The comment sparked online controversy over Lively during the movie’s promotion in 2024. Though it eventually died down over time, this discourse has most recently been reignited by the press tour for “Sunrise on the Reaping” — the upcoming latest installment of “The Hunger Games” franchise. These are not isolated events, but instead part of a larger pattern: when marketing movie adaptations of popular books about serious themes, promoters frequently ignore and disrespect the themes of the story in an attempt to reduce the movie to a steady stream of revenue. Furthermore, in reductively advertising serious books and accentuating lighthearted aspects of the story, the studio risks reproducing the very distortions those stories criticize.
Increasingly, studios ditch covering meaningful topics addressed in the source material, instead focusing on more frivolous, superficial and viral attributes. In France on Oct. 7, Lionsgate transformed the Musée Rodin sculpture garden in Paris into a Capitol-themed fashion installation to promote “Sunrise on the Reaping” — the Capitol being the governing body in the movie that physically and tactically suppresses the characters. Meanwhile, mass protests took place across the country, protests that have been met with rampant police brutality. The film and book are rooted in class dynamics and the brutality of authoritarianism, interrogating how people in power use barbaric entertainment to maintain control over populations. In this moment of sheer irony, most of the media coverage has been about press tour outfits and memes that have come from the franchise, alongside coverage torturing actress Mckenna Grace with a slew of asinine questions about her Peeta edits or an old childhood interview.
Even back in 2022, the promotion of the movie adaptation “Where the Crawdads Sing” was tailored toward young women who had a heart for thrilling romantic movies. Romance BookTokers raved about this book, referencing the heart-throbbing scenes and the mysteriously whimsical nature of the marshlands where the story took place. However, some audiences were shocked by the fact that these scenes existed amid a larger plotline about the cycle of abuse, revenge and survival, which was largely left out of conversations prior to the movie’s release.
Much of the movie’s publicity and interviews also focused on Taylor Swift’s original song “Carolina,” and on bringing representations of “women in nature” to the big screen — as Witherspoon said in an interview with Entertainment Weekly. With actors, publicists and hosts choosing to deprioritize or skate over the more serious issues at the heart of the story, the prospective audience is forced to do so as well.
Similarly, controversies over “It Ends With Us,” glamorizing abuse (and treating it as the ultimate “twist”), were ignored in favor of Lively’s floral press tour outfits and her upcoming hair care brand, Blake Brown. The domestic violence at the core of the movie was barely mentioned in its promotion, and later even further swallowed up by the dramatic and absurd legal drama between Lively and the movie’s director, Justin Baldoni.
Perhaps people are overwhelmed by the volume of difficult information we encounter daily, from which movies offer an escape. And there is a place for fun in movie promotion, even in serious films; but the problem starts when that becomes the entire focus of their media coverage. Ignoring the systemic or personal issues these films invite us to address and take action on does both them and us a disservice.
It is reasonable to consider that if the entire lead-up to the film is about how depressing it is, it could persuade audiences not to see it. However, there needs to be a balance. We can have fun discussions about method dressing on the red carpet or listen to actors joke, but only in tandem with actual questions about the film’s subject matter.
We cannot directly influence how these studios promote movies to the general public, but we can influence the conversations that follow. Reading with greater scrutiny, looking beyond the spectacle of an adaptation and questioning what a film leaves out are small ways of resisting the flattening of these stories. We should be able to engage with the uncomfortable subjects a story raises, even when its promoters would rather sell us something easier to digest.
Movie marketing doesn’t have to turn every press tour into a seminar. There is space for the florals, the outfits and the memes. But when a story is built around domestic violence, authoritarianism or systemic injustice, those subjects shouldn’t become the one thing its promotion refuses to discuss. A film can sell an escape without asking its audience to look away from its parts that we can learn from.
Lilah Daniels SC ’30 is unashamed to admit that she engages with the fun parts of movie marketing (and loves method dressing, specifically). However, she still thinks movie promoters should do a better job addressing the serious subjects and themes of these stories when actually talking about the film.
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