Campaign Urges Cinemas to Refuse Ali G Film as 36,000 Emails Flood Chains
A media-monitoring platform called NewsCord has launched a campaign urging cinemas worldwide to refuse to screen Amazon MGM's "Ali G: Who Iz I?", claiming more than 36,000 emails had been sent to major chains by Friday (Variety, 28 August 2026).
The film is a mockumentary built around Sacha Baron Cohen's character Ali G, a satirical figure Baron Cohen first introduced in 1998 on Channel 4's "11 O'Clock Show" (Variety, 28 August 2026). Baron Cohen secretly filmed the new project years after retiring the character — he said in December 2007 that he would never play Ali G or Borat again because the characters had lost their potency (The Guardian, 21 December 2007). NewsCord's campaign states that Amazon revived the character for the new film (NewsCord, 27 August 2026). The film is scheduled to open on 23 October 2026 (NewsCord, 27 August 2026).
NewsCord's campaign accuses Baron Cohen of using satire as a "cover for enforcing racist stereotypes" and cites a 2000 newspaper report in which Black British comedians called Ali G an "alibi for racism" (Variety, 28 August 2026). In that same 2000 article, comedian Felix Dexter argued that Ali G "allows the liberal middle classes to laugh at Black street culture in a context where they can retain their sense of political correctness," and the writer Jeanette Winterson compared the character to the Black and White Minstrels (Variety, 28 August 2026). The British writer and broadcaster Afua Hirsch separately wrote on Substack that the Ali G character is now widely out of step with the present moment (Variety, 28 August 2026).
The campaign scored what it presented as an early win. Picturehouse Cinemas replied to one of NewsCord's emails with the statement: "We currently do not have any plans to screen this film on its release." NewsCord claimed that meant the chain would not be showing the title (Variety, 28 August 2026). Variety, however, reported that the Picturehouse email was a standard customer response sent for any release query about a film the company has not yet booked — and that no decision had been made (Variety, 28 August 2026).
Phil Clapp, head of the U.K. Cinema Association, pushed back on the premise of the campaign. Cinemas "are not there to act as censors or arbiters of public taste," he said (Variety, 28 August 2026).
The Ali G character was originally conceived as a satirical take on privileged suburban kids who adopted Black street culture — a joke aimed at the poseurs, not the culture they were borrowing (The Guardian, 15 July 2026). Whether that satire still reads the same way in 2026 is exactly the question the campaign is forcing exhibitors and audiences to confront.
