After a stream of phone calls objecting to the superfluous depiction of
Elisha Cuthbert, actress on the television show
24, being tortured and killed in the film entitled
Captivity, the movie producers are going to take down the offending ads.
The ads, sited on 30 Los Angeles-area billboards, as well as 1,400 New York taxi stops, first appeared on March 13, showcased four frames having captions above each one. The first frame entitled “Abduction” featured Elisha Cuthbert with a gloved hand over her face. The second frame featured Cuthbert behind a chain-link fence with a bloody finger poking through that had a caption of “Confinement.” The third frame with the caption “Torture” featured the actress’ face covered in white gauze with tubes shoved up her nose. The last frame called “Termination” depicted her with her head thrown back as if she were dead.
While fans of Cuthbert are used to seeing the actress in intensely violent scenes on television with her inclusion on the show
24, other people are just not used to seeing brutal violence on billboards. After Dark Films, the company behind the said film is paying to have the ads removed. Meanwhile, After Dark Films’ theatrical distribution partner, Lionsgate, maintains that it had no participation with the ads, which was actually produced by Arts Machine Digital, and that the promotion and marketing efforts was exclusively handled by After Dark.
After Dark CEO, Courtney Solomon, explained that the billboard ads were unintentional. He claimed that the wrong files were sent to the printer, subsequently passing them on to the billboard company without any approval from the company’s executives. He said, "Personally, I wasn't going to go with this campaign. I thought it was OTP (over the top). Nothing like this can ever happen again."
-Kris De Leon, BuddyTV Staff Columnist
Source: Scotsman News