Amazon has dropped a set of “gunless” James Bond posters from its Prime Video streaming platform after protests that it was sanitising the brand that its studio arm, Amazon MGM studios, bought for more than $1bn in February.
The streaming platform had issued a new set of digital poster artwork, to coincide with James Bond day on Sunday, intended for use as thumbnail imagery on its own and other platforms. However fans quickly noticed that even by the standards of bland streaming-platform imagery, the results were particularly startling.
Most prominently, all guns appeared to have been removed from already well known images, including a portrait of Sean Connery cradling a Walther PPK pistol in his crossed arms used as a publicity shot for Dr No, and now in the National Portrait Gallery. A widely seen teaser poster for the Daniel Craig film Spectre has been apparently edited to crop out the gun he is holding by his side (though the shoulder holster Craig wears is still visible). A similar crop appears to have been made on a publicity image of Roger Moore in Live and Let Die, in which Moore is holding a .44 Magnum, a departure from the Bond tradition of relatively small handguns.
Criticism of the move erupted immediately across social media, and the new artwork was immediately denounced as “woke” by outlets including the Sun and the Daily Mail.
However, Amazon has now removed the artwork from its Prime Video streaming platform, replacing it with more traditional still images from the films themselves – though notably also gun-free.
Amazon has been contacted for comment.
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