Despite what many Westerners may think, not all Asian skylines look the same. And while you might not be as familiar with them as you are with, say, those of New York City and Chicago, they do in fact have quite distinctive features. For example, the Shanghai skyline in China has the easily-distinguishable, 1,535-foot-high, bulbous Oriental Pearl TV Tower, while the Hong Kong skyline does not. See? Different.
And yet, for some reason, that Shanghai landmark found its way amongst the many skyscrapers along Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbour on the new promotional poster for Denis Villeneuve’s upcoming sci-fi movie Arrival:
People—particularly people who happen to live in the Oriental Pearl TV Tower-free autonomous territory of Hong Kong—are not unsurprisingly annoyed at this mistake, especially in the context of Hollywood’s history of all-around awfulness in regards to Asian actors and characters. We can now add “Asian buildings” to the long list of slights.
The righteous-indignation-fueled hashtag #HongKongIsNotChina has recently started trending on Twitter and Facebook, prompting the Arrival team to do some quick scrambling, issue a kind of apology, and blame the whole debacle on “a 3rd party vendor.”
Don’t blame them, they probably outsourced this marketing campaign to Mumbai.