“Gone with the Wind” is now the best-selling movie on Amazon–a day after HBO Max banned the movie for being too “racist.”
Amazon sells the movie as a streamed rental for $3.99 and a streamed purchase for $9.99. It also sells a DVD edition for $29.55. Amazon bases its ranking on total sales data.
“Gone with the Wind” also shot to fifth place on Apple’s iTunes movie chart.
For decades, the 1939 movie had been the highest-grossing film in American history, and frequently cited as one of the best films of all-time. It won 8 Oscars, including a win for Best Supporting Actress for actress Hattie McDaniel–the first black person ever to win an Academy Award for her portrayal as a slave.
Another black woman wouldn’t win an acting Oscar for more than five decades, when Whoopi Goldberg won the same trophy in 1990 for “Ghost.”
Despite the film being beloved by the American people, it had recently been targeted by activists who thought the portrayal of slavery had been racist and the portrayal of the Civil War had been romanticized.
HBO Max, apparently, agreed with this sentiment.
“’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,” said an HBO Max spokesman, to Variety Magazine. “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.”
However, despite the dust-up, the film is rumored to be returning to the streaming service as soon as next week–albeit with a new intro filmed a prominent African-American Studies professor, who has not yet been named.
