HBO won’t alter Watchmen marketing in response to recent shootings

Three weekends ago, a pair of mass shootings — one in a Walmart in El Paso, Texas and one in the Oregon Historic District in Dayton, Ohio — claimed the lives of a combined 32 people, with dozens more injured. As has become routine in the aftermath of tragedies like these, politicians and citizens alike called for action, urging lawmakers to implement common sense gun control and to tamp down on hateful ideologies like white nationalism to prevent events like this from happening again. The governor of Ohio, Republican Mike DeWine, even proposed new gun control laws, so perhaps there could be real action taken.

But just as predictably, other politicians — including President Donald Trump — took focus off those solutions by blaming America’s well-documented and uniquely serious gun violence problem on things like violent video games and mental health, while backing away from commitments to increase gun safety.

The reasons for such timidity on the part of American politicians are too many and frustrating to get into here, so let’s move on. It’s in this context that Universal Pictures decided not to release its movie The Hunt into theaters. The Hunt is about a group of strangers who wake up to find themselves hunted by ultra-rich elitists who consider them to be “deplorables,” a word borrowed from the 2016 presidential campaign trail. Now, if you ask me, The Hunt sounds like it’s purposely baiting people into being outraged and seems like it would be in poor taste even outside the current news cycle. But I’m not sure pulling it from theaters is the solution, since that only perpetuates the idea that violent media is behind these mass shootings, which makes it easier to forego solutions that might actually address the problem.

Nevertheless, it’s something that studios are thinking about when marketing their content, especially if that content touches on controversial subjects. Case in point: HBO’s upcoming Watchmen show will deal directly with police violence and feature a group of white supremacists as its villains, at least according to IndieWire. “[Alan Moore’s original 1986 Watchmen graphic novel] was about what was happening in American culture at the time,” said showrunner Damon Lindelof at the Television Critics Association summer press tour. “What, in 2019, is the equivalent of the nuclear standoff between the Russians and the United States? And it just felt like it was undeniably race and policing in America. And so that idea started to graft itself into the Watchmen universe and needed to be presented in a responsible way.”

Incidentally, Lindelof co-wrote The Hunt, so he’s no stranger to hot-button topics. Watchmen doesn’t seem as purposefully inflammatory as The Hunt, but it’s still poking at some American sore spots. The show is debuting in October, so we can expect HBO to make a marketing push soon. Will HBO soften anything about its marketing in light of recent events? According to a spokesperson, no:

"HBO has a long history of championing thought-provoking storytelling like Watchmen, a blend of fantastical science fiction and political/social commentary which is based on the original iconic graphic novel. We have approached the marketing of Watchmen with great care from the outset. The first two trailers for the series have already been released and our future materials will continue in the same vein. There are no current plans to alter the marketing strategy in any significant way."

Overall, I’m okay with that strategy. Hopefully the show can live up to the descriptor of “thought-provoking.” Being provocative, even lazily so, is no cause to pull something from the air, but in a political minefield of the kind we’re all currently wandering, it doesn’t hurt to put careful thought into your messaging.

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