Last week, Netflix was faced with a crisis following their release of the award-winning film Cuties. According to Todisco (2020), “Cuties follows Amy (Fathia Youssouf), an 11-year-old girl from Senegal who joins a dance team dubbed ‘the cuties’ at her school and slowly becomes more aware of her blossoming femininity, which causes tension in her traditional family” (para. 3). The film did not receive a similar reaction to the praise it got at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival from Netflix viewers. Unfortunately, “the fallout surrounding the movie began even before its Netflix debut” (TODAY, 2020, 0:46). A month before Cuties began streaming, Netflix had to apologize and pull a poster that was used to promote the film. According to Todisco (2020), “Netflix issued a public apology following backlash over the Cuties marketing poster, with critics claiming it sexualized children” (para. 12). The apology states, “We’re deeply sorry for the inappropriate artwork that we used for Mignonnes/Cuties. It was not OK, nor was it representative of this French film which won an award at Sundance. We’ve now updated the pictures and description” (Netflix, 2020).
Since its official Netflix release, Cuties and Netflix have continued to face the growing backlash from its viewers. The film has been accused of sexualizing children and Netflix has been accused of supporting it. Viewers have taken to Twitter to share their response using the hashtag, #CancelNetflix. Some have gone far enough to actually cancel their Netflix subscriptions, and “over 598,000 people have signed a Change.org petition titled ‘Cancel Netflix subscription,’ accusing the film of exploiting children, showing underage girls ‘dressed provocatively, dancing sexually’ and being rate “only for adult viewers” (Frishberg, 2020, para. 8). As of today, Netflix has not issued a response to the hashtag, nor have they announced plans to remove the French coming-of-age film.
I had a very tough time assessing this situation. As a public relations practitioner, I know that any crisis involving children can be hypersensitive. However, I came to the conclusion that I believe Netflix should not remove the film from its streaming platform. I do think they should produce a public statement saying that they don’t agree or support the tweets claiming the film sexualizes children. It would even be a good idea for their spokesperson to address the Director, Maïmouna Doucoure, main point of the film, “the real question of ‘Cuties’ is can we as women truly choose who we want to be beyond the role models that are imposed upon us by society” (TODAY, 2020, 2:28).
When relating this to our assigned reading, I found a few commonalities with the case study we were given this week. One being, both crisis management teams for Canadian Jet and Netflix were dealing with a challenge paracrisis, “when the organization is confronted by discontented stakeholders with claims that it is operating in an inappropriate manner” (Coombs, 2019, ). Netflix’s crisis management team was faced with two decisions, first, “should the organization address the challenge,” and second, “how should the organization respond to the challenge if the decision is to respond” (Coombs, 2020, p. 53). I think Netflix did a good job by choosing to release an apology for this paracrisis. However, “the challengers provide a means of assessing the effectiveness of the paracrisis response in reducing the threat. If challengers end the challenge, the threat is reduced. If challengers escalate the challenge and successfully recruit other stakeholders to view the organization as irresponsible, the threat reduction has failed” (Coombs, 2019, p. 53). When Netflix went ahead and released the film and ignored the continued backlash from the challengers, their paracrisis developed into a full blown crisis. I hope they come up with a statement soon addressing the fact that they do not agree with the statements that they support the sexualization of children.
References
Coombs, W. T. (2019). Ongoing crisis communication planning, managing, and responding (5th ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
Frishberg, H. (2020, September 10). Viewers call to cancel Netflix after controversial ‘Cuties’ premiere. New York Post. https://nypost.com/2020/09/10/viewers-call-to-cancel-netflix-after-controversial-cuties-premiere/
Netflix [@netflix]. (2020, August 20). We’re deeply sorry for the inappropriate artwork that we used for Mignonnes/Cuties [Tweet]. Twitter. https://twitter.com/netflix/status/1296486375211053057
TODAY. (2020, September 14). ‘Cuties’ spark calls for boycott of Netflix [Video]. Youtube.
Todisco, E. (2020, September 10).Why people are urging users to #CancelNetflix: Behind the controversial new movie Cuties. People. https://people.com/movies/cancel-netflix-trends-controversial-new-film-cuties/
Claire Lee Hawkins 