Depraved Poster Controversy: Star Cynthia Erivo Responds

Final week, Warner Bros.’s Wicked did what any film adapting a well-known Broadway play would do and uploaded a brand new poster highlighting its essential stars Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo. The poster, which noticed Grande’s Glinda whispering within the ear of Erivo’s Elphaba, now sees itself on the epicenter of on-line drama between followers that received so out of hand that Erivo needed to air them out on her official social media account.

The brand new picture of Grande and Erivo pays homage to the unique play’s iconic illustration. Even if in case you have by no means seen Depraved on stage, likelihood is you’ve seen this poster out within the wild as a result of it was nearly inescapable within the early aughts. Nonetheless, a notable change in Warner Bros. Discovery’s in any other case one-to-one recreation of the unique play’s poster is that Erivo’s face isn’t obscured by the shadow of her pointy witch hat. Whereas this minute element wouldn’t rock the world of any abnormal particular person wanting on the two posters, the web went fairly wild with this discrepancy. What adopted was a tirade of fan edits claiming to have “mounted” Warner Bros.’s poster with the preliminary intention of creating Erivo’s Elphaba as devilishly witchy because the Broadway poster’s iteration of the character.

Have you ever heard? #WickedMovie tickets on sale now! 💚🩷 https://t.co/ZusjT6MqoA pic.twitter.com/8CQgqGgL8n

— Depraved Film (@wickedmovie) October 9, 2024

Key amongst these fan edit adjustments have been casting a shadow throughout Erivo’s eyes and enhancing her lips to have an analogous crimson lipstick because the Broadway poster. Someplace down the road, followers received even weirder with their armchair graphics design sensibilities and “created” AI movies of the Depraved poster referencing an in-fandom meme the place Glinda asks Elphaba about her personal elements being inexperienced, too (I don’t go right here; I simply write the information). This all prompted Erivo to pontificate on her official Instagram story and name out all of the weirdo habits from Depraved followers.

“That is the wildest, most offensive factor I’ve seen, equal to that terrible AI of us preventing, equal to individuals posting the query ‘is your ***** inexperienced.’ None of that is humorous. None of that is cute. It degrades me. It degrades us,” Erivo wrote.

She continued: “The unique poster is an illustration. I’m an actual life human being, who selected to look proper down the barrel of the digital camera to you, the viewer…as a result of, with out phrases we talk with our eyes. Our poster is an homage not an imitation, to edit my face and conceal my eyes is to erase me. And that’s simply deeply hurtful.”

Erivo adopted up her Instagram story by resharing the unique Depraved film poster of her and Grande with the caption, “Let me put this proper right here, to remind you and cleanse your palette.”

Cynthia Erivo reacts to edits of the ‘Depraved’ poster and the viral AI preventing animation:

“Our poster is an homage not an imitation, to edit my face and conceal my eyes is to erase me. And that’s simply deeply hurtful.” pic.twitter.com/R7jGz0Nxnx

— Pop Crave (@PopCrave) October 16, 2024

Now that every one that drama has been defined and nipped within the bud, hopefully followers can extra positively focus their unbridled pleasure for the prequel Wizard of Oz musical. Depraved is definitely half one in every of a movie duology, with its second half scheduled to launch in November 2025. Whereas the size of the movie was in competition at first, the official AMC Theaters web page, Fandango, and Moviefone all verify that Depraved has a two-hour and 40-minute runtime. For these conserving rating, that’s as long as the Broadway play with an intermission. Hopefully, the movie will justify doubling the size of its supply materials throughout two movies.

Depraved releases in theaters November 22.

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