Freeman’s Past Statements May Have Hurt Previous Warner Brothers Movie Gross; Shareholder Concern Expressed for Upcoming Batman Movie Starring Freeman.
At today’s Time Warner, Inc. shareholder meeting in Burbank, California, a representative of the National Center for Public Policy Research plans to ask company executives about concerns they should have about past and potential alienating political comments made by actor Morgan Freeman and their possible negative effects on Warner Brothers Studios movie profits.
In his prepared question, Oscar Murdock, a spokesman for the National Center’s Project 21 black leadership network and a tea party activist, asks: “Considering the potential damage Mr. Freeman’s radical politics inflicted on his last Warner Brothers film, is Time Warner taking any steps to make sure that the press tour for the new Batman movie is not similarly used by Mr. Freeman to promote his divisive views, but instead to affirmatively draw people to movie theaters?”
On the day Freeman’s last movie for Warner Brothers was released — “Dolphin Tale,” on September 23, 2011 — the actor went on CNN’s “Piers Morgan Tonight” and called tea party movement opposition to Barack Obama “a racist thing.” Freeman added that the tea party agenda was to “screw the country” so the President would fail.
According to a poll by Penn Schoen Berland that was conducted for The Hollywood Reporter, conservatives and people of faith expressed more interest than liberals in seeing “Dolphin Tale” at the time of its release, but 34 percent of conservatives and 37 percent of tea party members indicated they were less likely to see the movie after learning about Freeman’s remarks about them on CNN. Clips of the Freeman comments went viral on the Internet.
[…]
