The London Underground has banned posters for Lee Cronin’s The Mummy because they depict a dead child and are apparently too realistic for commuters waiting for the Northern Line. Transport for London deemed the imagery distressing enough to pull from stations across the network. The film itself—a horror movie about a mummy, which is to say, a dead thing—remains legal to watch, distribute, and financially profit from.
So the logic here is bulletproof: showing people an advertisement for a horror film in a space where they stand shoulder-to-shoulder with actual living humans is where we draw the line. Not the film itself. Not the fact that you can buy a ticket and watch it in a dark room with strangers. The poster. The poster is the problem.
Meanwhile, London commuters scroll past news of actual dead children in actual conflicts on their phones while waiting for the same train. But those aren’t artistic renderings, so they don’t need banning. They’re just reality, which apparently is fine to ignore at scale.
The Mummy will still open in cinemas nationwide. People will still pay to see it. Transport for London will still have successfully protected nobody from anything except the knowledge that a horror film exists. The poster ban is advertising of the highest order—you cannot buy this kind of free press. Cronin’s team didn’t pay for this. TfL just did their job for them.