HBO Max temporarily removes Gone with the Wind over 'racist depictions'

Gone with the Wind is gone from HBO Max — at least temporarily.

WarnerMedia's streaming service announced this week the classic 1939 Civil War film has been removed from its platform amid the ongoing protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd, CNN reports.

"Gone with the Wind is a product of its time and depicts some of the ethnic and racial prejudices that have, unfortunately, been commonplace in American society," a spokesperson for HBO Max said. "These racist depictions were wrong then and are wrong today, and we felt that to keep this title up without an explanation and a denouncement of those depictions would be irresponsible."

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

But HBO Max is planning to bring the film back with "a discussion of its historical context and a denouncement of those very depictions," with the spokesperson saying it will be shown "as it was originally created, because to do otherwise would be the same as claiming these prejudices never existed."

This will presumably come in the form of a disclaimer, and HBO Max's statement echoes a warning that Warner Bros. previously added to old cartoons to denounce the "ethnic and racial prejudices" of the time but explain why they'll be shown as originally created.

12 Years a Slave screenwriter John Ridley had earlier this week written a piece for the Los Angeles Times arguing that HBO Max should pull Gone with the Wind, writing that it "is a film that, when it is not ignoring the horrors of slavery, pauses only to perpetuate some of the most painful stereotypes of people of color," as well as "romanticizes the Confederacy in a way that continues to give legitimacy to the notion that the secessionist movement was something more, or better, or more noble than what it was."