Sony Screen Gems Faces Chris Brown Dilemma

When Sony Screen Gems announced the casting of singer and teen idol Chris Brown as part of the cast for the urban action/thriller movie Bone Deep, it was no doubt seen as a casting coup. Brown was known as a clean-cut teen idol, with a burgeoning and promising career as a singer-actor-songwriter.

Fast forward to the present: Brown admittedly has beat up his fellow teen idol girlfriend pop star Rihanna.

And now with the planned release date of Bone Deep looming, Sony is faced with somewhat of an issue, probably wondering if it should follow National Milk Mustache/got Milk? organization and Wrigley and give the now-controversial singer the boot in its ads and publicity campaign for the film.

Other options include ignoring the situation, and hope that by the January 2010 date, (an eternity away it may seem, but court cases are known to drag on for years) the scandal will have died down, or that another celebrity scandal will have eclipsed it. As sang froid as this sounds, this is Hollywood after all.

But what about pre-release marketing and PR plans, which of course begin ahead of the movie’s actual release? It’s been said that all publicity is good publicity, but the singer is clearly in a PR quagmire and while he wasn’t exactly carrying the movie, his presence in the movie was no doubt being counted on to help bring flocks of teen fans to theatres. But with Paul Walker, T.I., and Hayden Christensen, not being no-names in the least, Sony marketing and PR execs could easily conclude that they can do without Brown, and edit his scenes out of the movie. But more undesired publicity could ensue from this action.

A third option would be to conclude that the singer’s personal life has no bearings on his career. But such nonchalance would only bring about a backlash.

Another option would be to push back the release of the movie. But Screen Gems, Sony’s specialty label only has a handful of projects each year, and that would certainly affect its annual output.

According to the site Wooha, the advertising fate of the movie has already been decided and Sony Screen Gems has opted for Choice 2:

“Unofficial word has it that Chris will be “erased” from marketing material such as the movie poster, trailer and TV ads to avoid any controversy. The movie has already finished filming in Los Angeles so Chris will still be in the movie but just don’t expect to see much of him in the advertising.”

Could this leak of “unofficial word” be just Sony’s way of testing the airwaves for public reaction towards ejecting Brown out of the movie?

There hasn’t been much of a precedent for a movie marketing and PR situation such as this one—at least to that degree—and it’ll be interesting to see how Sony officially handles it.

Still Credit: Photo Agency