‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ Movie Poster And Trailer Amended In China


Star Wars: The Force Awakens opened earlier this week, and in the lead up to the release, fans were desperate to see anything they could of the highly anticipated movie, according to The Verge.

The unexpected new trailer for Star Wars: The Force Awakens was released in China and introduces the fans to Lu Han, one of the Chinese-Korean K-pop group Exo behind Star Wars-themed banger “Lightsaber.”

The trailer also includes brand new scenes as well as new dialogue that was added to scenes released before.

China has been accused of deliberately removing or downplaying characters of color from the official poster of Star Wars: The Force Awakens officially used across China, according to CNN.

Star Wars fans have used Twitter to express their outrage over China shrinking British actor John Boyega, who plays Finn in Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Meanwhile, other non-white characters of the movie such as Oscar Isaac’s Poe Dameron and Lupita Nyong’o’s Maz Kanata were removed from the poster completely.

Hong Kong-based columnist and political commentator, Ray Kwong, posted on Twitter about the seemingly racist posters in China.

With the Star Wars: The Force Awakens poster triggering quite an uproar in the media, Disney has not commented on the matter yet.

There has been a number of commenters who compared the racist posters to the scandal over an Italian promotional campaign for Twelve Years a Slave, which replaced Chiwetel Ejiofor with Brad Pitt, who appeared in the movie for just a few minutes. Studio Lionsgate later removed the posters, claiming they had never been approved.

However, Chinese state media has responded to the criticism over the Chinese Star Wars posters, saying that the change on the posters has nothing to do with racism. “Since the poster is merely a promotion method and an individual case, it would be unfair to criticize Chinese audiences for discriminating against the black actor,” Chinese state-run newspaper The Global Times quoted Chen Qiuping of the Beijing Film Association as saying, according to We Are Central PA.

The paper have been accused of racism in the past. Earlier this year the Global Times published a cartoon ahead of U.S. President Barack Obama’s visit to Kenya with the caption “homecoming.”

Star Wars: The Force Awakens was shown at the Imax TCL Chinese Theater in Los Angeles on the evening of December 17. According to The New York Times, the crowd began to assemble at the theater five days earlier, on Saturday afternoon, with fans clamoring to be the first ones to see the movie.

Hundreds of opening-weekend show times for Star Wars: The Force Awakens have been sold out. Last week, AMC Theaters claimed that as many as 1,600 opening-weekend screenings were sold out, while 3.5 million tickets were still available. At least 36 AMC theaters in the U.S. will show Star Wars: The Force Awakens around the clock.

And these figures were certainly represented by the box office taking on this opening weekend of the new Star Wars movie, with taking exceeding all expectations.

[Photo by David McNew/Getty Images]

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