You know what Melissa McCarthy looks like. If you don’t (and that would mean you’ve never seen her in anything, in which case I feel sorry for you), here’s a pic from her new buddy cop comedy The Heat, which I’ve been looking forward to for a while (and still am, because this screw-up is on marketing).
OK. So now look at McCarthy in the poster up above. Notice anything different?
I don’t even know what was going through the head of whoever designed this. There are poorly Photoshopped movie posters, and then there are poorly Photoshopped movie posters that take a plus-sized actress and shrink her face. Looked at in the context of the first category, this poster is just kind of laughably funny. It doesn’t even look like her, her head’s tiny compared to her neck, and, as has been pointed out, her eye color is wrong.
But when you consider that somewhere along the line someone involved with 20th Century Fox’s marketing team said “Y’know, I think people might be put off if they see this movie co-stars a larger actress. Let’s take a few pounds off the face,” and when you consider that no one (at least no one with any authority) stepped in and said no, that’s monumentally awful, don’t do that? Yeah, this poster just went from funny-bad to offensive-bad.
Never mind that McCarthy has proven herself a popular comedy actress, all the while people knowing that she’s *gasp* not skinny. If an actor looks a certain way in the movie, they should look that way on the poster. It’s not rocket science, dammit.
This poster is for the UK release of the film, so unless that’s where you live, congratulations, you probably won’t have to see this monstrosity around. I would hope that people in the UK won’t either, because hopefully at some point the distributor will decide they don’t want something so offensive—not to mention bad, quality-wise—associated with their movie.
Face-palms all around. This reminds me of that time the New York Observer‘s film critic used his review of Identity Thief as a forum to make cracks about McCarthy’s weight, and I didn’t want to be reminded of that, because it makes me mad.
(via: The Shiznit, hat tip to Britt Hayes)
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