Cynthia Erivo's Wicked Poster Controversy

Overview

Cynthia Erivo's Wicked Poster Controversy refers to a series of critical reactions and backlash of fan-made posters highlighting the 2024 Wicked film and its main stars Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo, which is a remake of the well-known Broadway play poster showing Glinda whispering in Elphaba Thropp's ear (the witch). The controversy began when Erivo criticized the AI videos and edits of the Wicked poster, as well as jokes about her character's genital color from the "Is Your P---y Green?" fandom meme, via Instagram Stories in mid-October 2024, which sparked even more memes and photoshopped versions of the movie's poster as social media users mocked her reaction.

Background

On October 9th, 2024, the official X^[1] account of the Wicked film posted a recreated version of the memorable stage musical poster (seen below), which amassed more than 19,000 likes and 5,400 reposts in a week.

Shortly after the poster was shared on social media, several netizens started to upload edited versions of the promotional image, casting a shadow across Cynthia Erivo’s eyes and editing her green lips to have a similar red lipstick as the original Broadway play illustration.

For example, X^[2] user @re_jah00 posted an edited version of the Wicked poster (seen below) on October 9th, 2024, amassing more than 11,000 likes and 200 reposts in a week.

Developments

Cynthia Erivo's Wicked Poster Reaction

On October 16th, 2024, English actress Cynthia Erivo (who plays the green witch character Elphaba Thropp) reacted via Instagram Stories to the Wicked movie fan-edit posters, AI memes and other jokes about her character, writing, "Our poster is an homage not an imitation, to edit my face and hide my eyes is to erase me. And that is just deeply hurtful."

Her post was later shared on X^[3] by the account @PopCrave, which amassed more than 20 million views and 25,000 likes in a day (shown below).

Online Reactions

Cynthia Erivo's reactions and criticism of the Wicked poster memes and jokes spawned even more content online mocking her as they garnered attention in mid-October 2024.

For example, on October 16th, 2024, the X^[4] page @infocharlixcx posted a photo of Charli XCX and Ariana Grande edited like the Wicked poster (seen below), to which Cynthia commented on the image on Instagram writing, "wow." The post amassed over 16,000 likes and 560 reposts in a day.

On October 16th, 2024, X^[5] user @2DEC0DE posted several screenshots from alleged tweets made by Cynthia Erivo on a purported "burner account." The post (seen below) amassed over 63,000 likes and 2,200 reposts in a day.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References