Over the past few years, the public has stopped treating movie press tours like marketing fluff and started treating them like reality shows. These often tedious stretches of talk-show appearances, red carpets, and press junkets that have been part of the Hollywood grind for decades are suddenly getting as much attention on social media as the films themselves, with the stars’ interactions being picked apart by fans.
Since the social media frenzy surrounding the 2022 film Don’t Worry Darling, press tours have become sites of intense speculation often translating to full-blown scandals, from affair speculation from Anyone but You fans to the persistent rumors of everyone versus Justin Baldoni on the set of It Ends With Us.
It’s not surprising that this trend has struck the most anticipated (or unavoidable) movie of the year, Wicked. However, it’s manifested in a more uncomfortable way than rumors about Harry Styles’s spit. Its two stars, Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande, have become subjects of rampant online theories and scrutiny regarding their red carpet appearances, adding an icky element to an otherwise wholesome movie rollout.
All of this press tour nonsense speaks to the free-for-all nature of the internet, particularly in the TikTok age. In its worst cases, this insatiable desire for controversy can override ethical or productive conversations. Inevitably, these narratives become seen as absolute truths.
Wicked’s press tour got the internet’s attention, for better or worse
The promotion for Wicked dates all the way back to March when Erivo and Grande presented at the Academy Awards together wearing green and pink gowns representing their respective roles as Elphaba and Glinda. Since then, themed dressing, a la Margot Robbie for Barbie, has been a significant feature of the press tour. The two have also been keen on highlighting their close friendship, one of the overarching themes of the musical. They often hold hands on red carpets and in interviews, in addition to complimenting one another’s talents in interviews. In a now-viral interview with reporter Jake Hamilton, they were asked how they’ve been changed by one another, causing Grande to well up. Both actresses’ tendency to cry and be overly sentimental while discussing the film, about witches and talking goats, has become a bit of a joke on social media before the conversation around them became a lot more serious.
Even separate from the press tour, Grande’s appearance was already being put under a microscope on social media. In April 2023, the singer posted a video on TikTok urging fans to stop speculating about her body weight after Redditors and other social media users expressed concern about her thinness. Grande told social media users to be “gentler and less comfortable” discussing people’s bodies.
Her response did little to quell those public chatter. In fact, the speculation around a potential eating disorder has torpedoed into a weeks-long discussion among both fans and detractors on social media in the months since Wicked’s press tour began. Social media users have claimed Erivo also looks markedly thinner. Some have even accused the pair of costars of having competitive eating disorders.
Meanwhile, others have expressed concern about the effects over Erivo and Grande being so hypervisible at their current state. Some even suggested the two are promoting eating disorders, if not inadvertently triggering people who have them. Others have put the responsibility on their teams for not intervening. In an op-ed for the Standard, India Block writes that the conversation around their appearance is more so “an indictment of Grande and Erivo’s management, the Wicked team, and the entertainment industry as a whole.”
In the wake of an Ozempic fad that’s taken over Hollywood and the concerns it’s raised, it’s not exactly a shock that we got here. Still, it’s unclear how this very public conjecture will benefit anyone. Maybe Grande and Erivo’s well-being was never really the point of the conversation.
How press tours became bigger than the movies
Considering the point of press tours is to generate press attention, Wicked’s was a massive success, despite the controversies that dogged the film along the way. Compared to the laundry list of other movies from the past few years whose press tours eclipsed the impact of the film itself, Wicked’s mess was positively tame.
While the discourse around the Barbie press tour, perhaps the most famous in recent history, seemed solely focused on star Margot Robbie’s hyper-coordinated fashion moments and director Greta Gerwig’s techniques to bring Barbieland to life, there was juicier drama behind the scenes of other films. When Glen Powell and Sydney Sweeney were busy promoting Anyone but You, their palpable chemistry didn’t go unnoticed. Both had partners going into filming, but Powell left single, after his girlfriend unfollowed Sweeney on Instagram and posted a cryptic breakup message (a source claimed they never hooked up).
This, of course, is what press tours are designed to do: Make audiences believe that the heat between its leads isn’t just an act, that it’s real — and if there are real-world repercussions, welp, that’s showbiz, baby. (Who could forget Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper’s year-long lovefest to promote A Star Is Born?). There are some cases where the on-set chemistry is, in fact, real — whenever Zendaya and Tom Holland get to promote a Spider-Man movie together, the internet collectively squeals — and some cases where it’s so real that people’s lives get blown apart (like when Kristen Stewart, then dating Robert Pattinson, had an affair with Rupert Sanders, the married director of Snow White and the Huntsman).
But the most compelling version of press tour drama is when the cast seems to absolutely hate each other. That’s what thirsty fans were treated to in advance of this fall’s It Ends With Us, in which star Blake Lively clashed with director and co-star Justin Baldoni. Though details were murky and mostly seemed to center on a difference in creative vision between the two (not exactly the stuff of soap operas), it snowballed into fodder for all kinds of other discussions on the controversial themes of the film, which dealt with domestic violence, Baldoni’s previous life as a self-identified “male feminist” voice online, and Lively’s husband Ryan Reynolds, who people tend to have strong opinions about.
2022’s Don’t Worry Darling had both love and hate — buzz about an affair between director and star Olivia Wilde and her lead actor, pop megastar Harry Styles, and rumors of tension between everyone from Wilde and actress Florence Pugh, Pugh and one-time co-star Shia LaBeouf, and, potentially, Styles and co-star Chris Pine, with whom he was alleged to have spit on at the premiere. (The spitting was roundly denied.)
All of these films have been major box office successes, begging the question of how much the off-screen drama convinced people to buy tickets. This isn’t always the case; when Joaquin Phoenix caused controversy for his behavior on the 2008 press tour for Two Lovers, which he later described as “performance art,” it didn’t translate to tons of sales.
Perhaps that’s because audiences’ relationship to press tours is extremely different than it was 16 years ago. Thanks to social media, people now have unprecedented access into the lives of celebrities and industry insiders to the point where they’re absorbing the jargon of the business and speculating on the career trajectories of their favorites. Normal fans now regularly discuss whether a certain star is sufficiently “media trained,” congratulating those who are able to sidestep uncomfortable questions and seem unflappable. You’d think it’s counterintuitive — don’t people want their celebrities to be unfiltered and entertaining rather than “brand-safe”? Instead, they cheer on the performance of celebrity rather than the celebrity herself.
In other words, press tours aren’t for the press anymore. They’re for the general public, which has, in turn, become the press — or at least the press that matters. What would once involve a trip to a couple late night talk shows and a glossy magazine cover now mandates appearances on a laundry list of shows, many of them online-only, whether that means shoving down chicken wings on Hot Ones, flirting with Amelia Dimoldenberg on Chicken Shop Date, taking a Vanity Fair lie detector test, or gabbing about your must-have products with GQ. Footage from these shows and red carpet interviews are then clipped and optimized to go viral on social media and become inescapable whether you’re interested in seeing the film or not.
Because so much of press tours now take place online, it’s even easier to feel like what you’re seeing is an authentic portrayal of actors’ lives. It seems less manufactured (though of course the celebrities are there to work). It’s easy to believe that Grande and Erivo really do share Glinda and Elphaba’s complex best friendship — or even, perhaps, that you’re their friend, too. A dramatic or intense off-camera dynamic among a cast now might be exactly what convinces audiences to shell out for movie tickets, because it feels like the stakes are immediate. Wait too long to see it, and you might have missed out on your chance to join in the discourse while it’s still fresh.
In the case of Wicked, it’ll be interesting to see how Part One compares to next year’s promotional tour. How many more times can we see Erivo and Grande in theatrical green and pink gowns crying over how much they love each other? How much more — and please excuse the Wicked pun — popular could it even get?
