Netflix Reportedly Made ‘Cuties’ Poster More Provocative, Despite “Uncomfortable” Employees

A year after the ill-advised marketing campaign for Maïmouna Doucouré‘s Cuties blew up in Netflix‘s face, a new report details how the streaming giant faced the massive controversy. According to The Verge, Netflix was “scrambling” behind the scenes to minimize the fall-out surrounding the Sundance darling, after they created a more controversial poster than the film’s original campaign showcased. To minimize the intense outpouring of criticism, they tweaked their recommendation algorithm and search results for the film so that viewers couldn’t discover it in inappropriate places.

The movie went under fire before it was even released on Netflix after the streamer released a highly controversial poster featuring young girls performing as a part of their twerking dance troupe. Although Netflix eventually changed the poster in light of the backlash online, the new report states that the original poster was the one that the streamer eventually switched back to: it was simply a photo of young girls running up a hill with shopping bags, not a shot of these tweens posing in skintight leotards and dance apparel.

Initially, however, Netflix decided that this original poster “wasn’t going to do well on the platform,” so they created their own, more “provocative” poster. The new poster made some employees “uncomfortable,” though few were willing to speak up about the situation because “it wasn’t their place.” See the two variations of the Cuties poster below.

After the backlash — and, again, this had all happened before Cuties had even been released on the streamer — Netflix continued their attempt to minimize the backlash. But it didn’t work. When the movie released, a wave of folks calling to #CancelNetflix crashed onto social media.

Still searching for a way to lessen the blow, Netflix removed Cuties from the “coming soon” and “popular searches” categories, also excluding it from queries for “cute.” The streamer also adjusted its algorithm so searches for the film would not surface “steamy/sexual titles” or kids’ movies. The streamer was sure that searches for terms like “pedo” wouldn’t surface results for Cuties, a real possibility, as Netflix’s algorithm takes behavioral data into account. If viewers search “pedo” but end up playing Cuties, the movie would eventually be tagged with the term.

According to The Verge’s report, this news hints that Netflix can and does manipulate its own algorithm. In the company’s own words, they dealt with the PR crisis by “suppress[ing] promotion and related search queries.” And yet, the crisis was not averted at all, really: Netflix customer service fielded over 16,000 messages following the movie’s release, one of the streamer’s largest causes of incoming customer messages of all time.