HBO Max Removes ‘Gone With The Wild,’ Says It Will Return With A ‘Denouncement’ Of Racial Prejudices

HBO Max has decided to temporarily remove Gone With the Wind from its streaming platform over racial prejudice concerns.

Gone With the Wind, which some people consider one of the top films ever made (it has a 91% score on Rotten Tomatoes), was quietly removed from HBO Max on Tuesday, with a promise to come back. The film, which stars Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh, is set in the south during the Civil War and Reconstruction. It’s been criticized over the years for depicting racism.

In an op-ed in The Los Angeles Times on Tuesday, 12 Years A Slave screenwriter John Ridley said HBO Max should remove the film in light of the tragic death of George Floyd and ongoing protests across the U.S. in support of Black Lives Matter. Ridley said Gone With the Wind is “a film that glorifies the antebellum south. 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.”

HBO Max subsequently removed the film from its newly launched streaming platform and put out a statement, saying that it will bring it back with the proper context attached.

“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,” WarnerMedia said in a statement. “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.”

WarnerMedia, which operates HBO Max for parent company AT&T
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, said that when the film comes back to the streaming service “it will return with a discussion of its historical context and a denouncement of those very depictions, but will be presented as it was originally created, because to do otherwise would be the same as claiming these prejudices never existed. If we are to create a more just, equitable and inclusive future, we must first acknowledge and understand our history.”

WarnerMedia didn’t say when the film may come back to HBO Max, but it speaks to a broader problem streaming companies are dealing with in their effort to bring back legacy content. Both WarnerMedia and Disney have placed warnings on some of their older content for depicting outdated, sometimes racist, and sometimes sexist depictions. Warnings aside, some feel the content shouldn’t be available to stream at all.