Universal has admitted to making two separate move trailers for ‘Straight Outta Compton’ to better suit different races. White people saw one trailer and black people saw another. For the white audience, Universal didn’t mention N.W.A. They focused their attention on on the rise of Ice Cube and Dr. Dre. The marketing chief for Universal, marketing chief Doug Neil and Jim Underwood, who is the head of Facebook’s entertainment spoke on their partnership while at SxSW.
Neil claims that the reasoning behind showing white people a different trailer was due to the fact that a lot of them do not have much knowledge of the rap history.
“They connected to Ice Cube as an actor and Dr. Dre as the face of Beats.”
The trailer for black people mentioned N.W.A and the rise of the group because most of them know the history behind the group. The film did not win an Oscar but it did win over $200 million at the box office. Not sure how much the white trailer had to do with it but Universal shouldn’t have assumed that white people or the “general population” as they called it, had never heard of N.W.A.
Source: TheVerge
