This time last month, the overwhelming majority of Netflix subscribers had never even heard of Cuties, but one crass and tasteless poster from the streaming site’s marketing department later, and the French coming-of-age drama has found itself gaining the unwanted reputation of perhaps the most controversial movie of 2020.
It doesn’t matter that Cuties is the critically acclaimed and award winning feature debut of an up-and-coming filmmaker, because all it took was a single image to send the internet into meltdown. Netflix may have issued a public apology, but that clearly wasn’t enough, and petitions were launched to have the pic pulled from the platform, while social media campaigns called on subscribers to cancel their accounts.
Cuties was quietly dropped onto the streaming service on Wednesday and viewers are already making a deliberate attempt to avoid it, which surely isn’t what either Netflix or director Maimouna Doucoure had in mind when they agreed to a deal that initially had the potential to see her breakout feature reach an exponentially wider audience.
Instead, Doucoure has been receiving death threats for a project she invested her heart and soul into, while Cuties is being review bombed into oblivion. Despite holding a solid 88% score on Rotten Tomatoes from 34 reviews, the audience scores tell a completely different story. Even though it would appear that nobody has actually seen it, Cuties has nonetheless racked up well over a thousand user reviews that have left it sitting on just 3%.
Things are much the same on Metacritic, where the critical consensus gives Cuties a score of 68 from eleven reviews, while more than 150 users have downvoted it to an average of just 0.8, and unfortunately, the only loser in the long run is going to be Doucoure.