Sony Pictures Straight Washes Call Me By Your Name

With a since-deleted Tweet, the Sony marketing department focused the gay film's spotlight on a straight relationship.

November 07 2017 6:14 PM EST

Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name has been playing festival after festival, slowly amassing widespread critical acclaim and major awards buzz. While the film doesn’t officially hit theatres until November 24, CMBYN’s distributor Sony Pictures Classics has been working tirelessly to promote the film everywhere in hopes of filling seats and prospective Oscar ballots.

However, the production and distribution company completely missed the mark with its newest advertisement on social media. The now-deleted tweet from @SonyPicturesUK, which featured Timothée Chalamet and Esther Garrel in a flirtatious still from the film, read, “It’s a romance overwhelming in its intensity, a heart that swells until it has to burst.”

Screen Shot 2017 11 07 At 6.02.12 Pm

This misconstrued ‘romance’ between Chalamet and Garrel couldn’t be farther from the protagonist’s focal love interest in Call Me By Your Name. While the nuclear ‘couple’ briefly hook up, the film revolves around the relationship between two men, Elio and Oliver (Armie Hammer). Whether this queer erasure of an evidently queer film was calculated or coincidental, the Twitterverse was quick to call out Call Me By Your Name’s poorly handled marketing.

The responses ranged from outrage to satire and varied in severity and playfulness, resulting in the ad’s removal from Twitter. Check out some of our favorite responses below: