What goes up must come down. Less than a week after a 4-foot-by-6-foot movie poster for upcoming flick Diana (starring Naomi Watts) went up by the famed Pont de l’Alma tunnel, it came down. According to The Hollywood Reporter, outraged citizens criticized the placement of the film advertisement “just steps away” from the entrance of the tunnel, where the late Princess died in a car crash on Aug. 31, 1997.
On Monday, Sept. 30, the poster was taken down. Several bouquets of flower were seen at the base of the Flame of Liberty statue, which honors Diana’s memory.
“I really don’t have any words to describe how I feel about this cynical and shameless attempt to publicize a film that should never have been made,” Rosa Monckton, one of Diana’s closest confidantes, told MailOnline, adding that the decision to place the poster so close to the tragic site was “crass.”
“To have made a film so speculative and as this is disgusting enough, but to then advertise it on the spot at which she died is despicable,” she said. “It is a terrible intrusion into her memory, not to mention the lives of her sons, whose feelings are often forgotten in these stories.”
Diana chronicles the late royal’s romance with Dr. Hasnat Khan, a Pakistani heart surgeon that she dated for two years until a few months before her death.
The movie has thus far been widely panned, and Watts, 45, has been on edge about the film’s reception, even walking out of a radio interview with British radio host Simon Mayo on BBC Radio 5’s Kermode and Mayo’s Film Review on Tuesday, Sept. 3.
“A first for me and @wittertainment as Naomi Watts walked out of an interview!” he tweeted to his 162,000 followers. “She seemed a tad uncomfortable with the questions. Shame.”