La La Land is getting a tenth anniversary rerelease this August, and with it, a new poster, featuring “A minor adjustment.” Jason P. Frank at Vulture explains (potentially paywalled; Apple News+ link):

Well, the studio adjusted it in the way that the Baptists tried to adjust Troye Sivan in Boy Erased. They straightened Ryan Gosling’s wrist.

In the iconic original poster for the film, Gosling’s hand sits at an angle from his arm, rather than continuing the line straight through. It is, for lack of a better term, a limp wrist — a classic signifier of gayness. […]

The gay little wrist ruled. It was a reminder that, while La La Land is a movie about a straight relationship, it’s also a musical, which is the gayest genre. Plus this kind of revisionism flies in the face of the nature of time. Gosling made a decision to have a gay little wrist, and now it’s a part of film history. No take-backsies.

The new poster just looks wrong. I vividly recall the original image. I remember thinking, before seeing the movie, that it was telegraphing an important character trait: a straight man forced to put on an act to get work, or perhaps a gay man striving but utterly failing to conceal his true self. That the movie turned out to be a rather pedestrian star-crossed-lovers story (in the Casablanca mold) contributed to my disappointment with the film. This hand change removes any such misapprehension, but also eliminates the one bit of tension I had going into the movie.