Report: Netflix Purposefully Made Cuties Poster More Provocative

Movies

According to Decider, Netflix made a concerted effort to make the promotional material for 2020’s Cuties – yes, that Cuties – more provocative, despite employees’ discomfort with the pseudo-pedophilia.

One year after the united (mostly united) distaste for the film’s borderline-pedophilic marketing campaign resulted in overwhelming public disgust and a lawsuit being filed in Tyler County, Texas over the “lewd visual material,” new insight as to what the streaming giant was thinking has emerged. Netflix was “scrambling” behind the scenes to minimize the fall-out surrounding the film after they deliberately created a more heinous poster than that of the original French-language release. To squelch the intense criticism, they tweaked their recommendation algorithm and search results so that viewers on Netflix wouldn’t inadvertently stumble upon the film in inappropriate places. Like general society, perhaps? Obviously, the move of a strong and proud company.

The movie was lambasted for more than the poster. Without going into great detail for decency’s sake, the film sexualizes children – pre-pubescent girls, to be precise. The streaming giant did alter the original poster after the backlash online, but a new report from The Verge states that the original poster was the one that the streamer eventually switched back to: it was simply a photo of young girls running up a cobblestone paved road, confetti in the background, all carrying shopping bags and dressed relatively appropriately. Contrasted with the degeneracy of the Netflix alteration, if they were trying to rage-bait: mission accomplished.

The change from the original poster – which, while better, does not change the film’s content – was because Netflix decided that it “wasn’t going to do well on the platform,” so they created their own, more “provocative” poster. The changes made several employees “uncomfortable,” though they stayed silent because they are cowards and claimed “it wasn’t their place” to speak up.

If you recall, the #CancelNetflix hashtag bombarded social media during the summer of 2020 and forced Netflix to remove Cuties from their “coming soon” and “popular searches” categories, and disassociated several searchable terms from the film, such as “cute, steamy/sexual titles, kids’ movies, or pedo.” That last one seems like an adequate search term.

The admission of being able to manipulate their own algorithm is one to note. The company stated that they dealt with the PR crisis by “supress[ing] promotion and related search queries.” Next time, just leave such depravity to the file shares, alright?