Ben Stiller's Tropic Thunder opened 12 years ago today. The $92M Stiller/Jack Black/RDJ action comedy opened #1 to $25.8M and finished with $110M DOM/$195M WW, and is considered one of the best comedies of the past 20 years.

HBO Max didn't add a "content warning" to Blazing Saddles because they didn't trust the general public to misunderstand the film, they added a content warning because they wanted to head off a angry social media mob.

. I would say it's also one of those things where the artist intention doesn't matter, if the public decides X then that's what it is.

who is the public in this situation? The actions by institutions on issues such as blackface are significantly ahead of general public opinion. You only really have 1/3 of the population saying this stuff is never acceptable. People are intelligent and able to distinguish between what is obviously done with malice and stuff that's not intentionally bigoted.

You can argue this is a bad set of beliefs people hold but they are the actual views people hold. There was no public vote before streaming websites removed random episodes of tv shows due to claims of being offensive.

that's our bigger concern here.

"We should judge this as offensive and in bad taste and consider people associated with this decision bad people" isn't the same thing as saying "random members of the public shouldn't be able to watch this movie." The latter is really what censoring content is all about. The Simpsons creators no longer want people to be able to watch their episode guest staring Michael Jackson (even on physical media) but that's obviously a separate issue from the moral decision to film the episode in the first place.

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