No black people? It must be Europe!
I haven’t seen Couples Retreat yet and based on the trailers, I doubt I’ll even bother to rent it. It just doesn’t look funny to me.
Not that I’m a movie snob or anything. I finally saw Paul Blart, Mall Cop a week ago and thought it was cute but ultimately forgettable. On the other hand, Forgetting Sarah Marshall was one of my favorite comedies ever, and I’m not ashamed to say I loved The Proposal. In other words, each to their own. Couples Retreat looks really bad to me, but I bet a lot of people thought it was hilarious.
That said, I find it a little bizarre that the distributor, Universal Pictures, decided to delete the token black couple from the movie poster on foreign releases. Evidently the company feels that British audiences prefer movies that don’t feature those pesky coloreds.
According to a spokesperson for the company, Universal isn’t ridiculously racist. They just wanted “to simplify the poster to actors who are most recognizable in international markets”.
That seems reasonable. After all, Malin Akerman, Kristen Davis, Jon Favreau, and Kristen Bell are international superstars, right?
People around the world know Malin as the incredibly bad actress that played Laurie Jupiter in The Watchmen, right? Kristen will forever be immortalized as the boring one on Sex in the City. Jon Favreau is the guy that directed Iron Man, so of course he’s an enormous box office draw. And Kristen Bell?
Well, Kristen Bell is the embodiment of everything that is truly good and wondrous in this world, so I’ll let that one slide. If the rest of the planet doesn’t recognize the perfection that is Veronica Mars, then they deserve a world without her.
So Universal Pictures decided to erase the darkies and concentrate on the pure race (just to “simplify” matters). That’s their perogative, right? (Please ignore the irony of quoting a black artist while defending a movie studio that is still uncomfortable featuring African-American people in theatrical productions.)
Out of curiosity, I decided to look up the American version of the Couples Retreat poster, and I realized that any attacks against Universal are pointless. The black couple on the poster might as well be wearing Waldo sweaters, cause hell if you can find them without looking extremely careful. I’m more surprised that anyone knew there were black actors in the cast based on the American poster than that someone noticed their tiny, cameo appearances far, far, FAR in the background had been deleted for those fickle European crowds. The company doesn’t have anything against black people as long as they don’t overshadow any of the decent white folk.
Fortunately, Universal will become more diverse in future productions. It’s Complicated features a white woman torn between a white man and another white man, Leap Year features a white woman who leaves a white man for another white man, and Wolfman features a white woman and two white men trying to survive against a brutal monster, but hey, the monster is played by a light-skinned Latino, so how can anyone possibly claim that Universal Pictures is run by racists?
