The Market Speaks

When the furore over Cuties hit the headlines, the calls for a boycott were blamed on puritans on the far right. Indeed, the film was misunderstood.

Mignonnes, or Cuties – an interesting, flawed debut feature for Netflix from Franco-Senegalese director Maïmouna Doucouré – finds itself at the centre of the nastiest obscenity row since David Cronenberg’s Crash in 1996. This is because of sequences showing a group of naive, excitable 11-year-old girls in a dance group twerking and pouting their way through a grotesquely sexualised adult routine. There has been an ugly and abusive social media storm, dominated by vicious trolls who haven’t seen the film and by mischief-makers jumping at the chance to embarrass those with Netflix connections such as the Obamas.

Given the catastrophic downward trend of Netflix subscriptions, it would seem that the reaction is not limited to the “far right”. It is more than that. It is that decent, ordinary people do not like what is effectively child pornography – albeit soft porn. Those masses of ordinary people voted with their feet.

Netflix‘s subscriptions plummeted and cancellations increased by 800 per cent following the release of the controversial French film Cuties, it has been reported.

Data unearthed by two analytics firms indicate that there was a sharp uptick in the number of people who cancelled their subscriptions around the same time that calls were growing for a boycott of Netflix over its airing of Cuties.

Antenna, a data analytics firm that tracks Netflix subscribers, reported a ‘meaningful spike in churn rate’ shortly after the hashtag #CancelNetflix went viral.

It is also interesting that the left is all too willing to defend this as being a critique on child exploitation. And, of course, we don’t understand. Just like we don’t understand Roman Polanski.