By now you’ve probably heard about the movie that got pulled last week amid mounting political outrage, The Hunt.
The marketing campaign for the movie was pulled in the wake of the two horrific mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton. The Hollywood Reporter subsequently reported that part of the conceit of the film is that liberal elites are hunting “deplorables.”
Typically, in stories about “the hunters vs. the hunted,” the hunted are the protagonists. But there was a flurry of outrage that even reached President Donald Trump himself:
A day after the president’s tweets, Universal yanked the film entirely.
The Hollywood Reporter has new reporting today on reaction to the film and the backlash internally, including the death threats people received:
Following a THR story earlier that day on the altering of the film’s marketing plan in the wake of a trio of mass shootings, Universal executives and the filmmakers began receiving death threats via email and on social media and immediately paused the campaign altogether.Sources say the studio’s internal security
force became involved, but outside law enforcement was not alerted. It appears that Universal did not foresee the maelstrom to come, including round-the-clock Fox News segments and tweets by President Trump seemingly directed at the title.
A test screening last week reportedly garnered “discomfort” from the audience with the politics of the film, and there was apparently some internal consternation about whether to pull the film.
Per THR, the studio didn’t want to “cave to the outrage of those who have not seen the finished film,” but they decided “it wasn’t worth the headaches” in the wake of the recent shootings.