It is all kicking off in the world of Wicked.
The poster for Wicked is one of the most iconic images in the West End of London or on Broadway. It is the famous advertising signature of the long-running, high-grossing show.
It is fairly self-explanatory and simple, as you can see here, on the billboard outside the show’s current London home. It has been exactly the same for decades.
When the makers of the new live-action cinematic adaption of Wicked created the marketing materials, of course, they would use this famous image as the basis but instead feature the two stars of the new movie – Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande.
This is what they came up with.
So far, so similar. However, Wicked has a large and devoted fan base. Some of those fans played around with the image and created a fan-made version that veered more closely to the Broadway and West End poster that everybody knows and loves. Here it is.
The lips reflect the red in the original poster. The smirking smile is there. They have also shaded in the hat to shadow the face, also as per the original. Harmless fan art, right? Wrong!
Not if you are star Cynthia Erivo. She has furiously slammed this fan edit on Instagram and hasn’t held back:
“This is the wildest, most offensive thing I have seen, equal to that awful AI of us fighting, equal to people posing the question ‘is your ***** green’
None of this is funny. None of it is cute. It degrades me. It degrades us. The original poster is an ILLUSTRATION. I am a real-life human being, who chose to to look right down the barrel of the camera to you, the viewer… because, without words we communicate with our eyes.
Our poster is an homage not an imitation, to edit my face and hide my eyes is to erase me.
And that is just deeply hurtful.”
Of course, as any of you who have been unfortunate enough to stumble across Mumsnet or one of those “AITA” posts on Facebook will know, what happened next was entirely predictable.
One screaming internet harpie declared:
“All of you supposed ‘Wicked fans’ should be f**king ashamed of yourselves.
Another borderline insane harridan ranted:
“I don’t care how much you love the original poster. For a show that’s all about prejudice and the color of a young woman’s skin the racism couldn’t be any clearer. You do not deserve this film.”
The standard levels of calm rationality were on display, as the outraged spittle flew from another yelling:
“They paid homage to the Broadway poster but that doesn’t give YOU the right to edit her face from the poster. You can tell she’s deeply hurt by this and if you can’t see that – then you’re the issue.”
To which we say…
…it’s just a poster, love.