OPINION: Movie marketing needs to stop misleading audiences

I’ll just say it: It was truly frightening to see Blake Lively’s character in “It Ends With Us” get pushed down the stairs, sexually assaulted and slapped in a movie she had promoted months earlier with the line “Grab your friends, wear your florals and head out to see it!” The comment sparked online controversy over Lively during the movie’s promotion in 2024. Though it eventually died down over time, this discourse has most recently been reignited by the press tour for “Sunrise on the Reaping” — the upcoming latest installment of “The Hunger Games” franchise. These are not isolated events, but instead part of a larger pattern: when marketing movie adaptations of popular books about serious themes, promoters frequently ignore and disrespect the themes of the story in an attempt to reduce the movie to a steady stream of revenue.

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