Sacha Baron Cohen Revives Ali G After 20 Years — and a Boycott Campaign Is Already Aimed at Cinemas
Sacha Baron Cohen is bringing back Ali G after two decades, and the campaign to keep him off cinema screens has already begun.
The film, titled Ali G: Who Iz I?, is a mockumentary directed by Cohen and distributed by Amazon-MGM Studios, set for an October theatrical release. The trailer dropped in August 2026, showing Cohen's clueless wannabe gangster attempting a career comeback and pranking a retired US general — adding him to a list of past targets that includes Buzz Aldrin and Donald Trump (The Guardian). Cohen last played the character on screen roughly 20 years ago (Hypebeast).
The return is not going unchallenged. NewsCord, a UK-based media-bias watchdog, organised its members to send roughly 37,000 emails to cinemas worldwide urging them to refuse to screen the film, arguing that the Ali G character is a racist caricature. NewsCord cited British writer Afua Hirsch, who criticised the character on Substack for sexualising black women and mocking working-class women (The Hollywood Reporter).
So far, no cinema chains have joined the boycott. NewsCord falsely reported that one chain planned to ban the film and later retracted the claim. Danish cinema chain NFBIO confirmed it will screen the movie, citing artistic expression as its defence (The Hollywood Reporter).
Cohen himself has acknowledged the combustible timing. Posting on X about the trailer, he wrote: "In an age where a comedian's career can be ended by a single un-PC joke, I thought I'd play it safe and bring this guy back" (The Hollywood Reporter).
The line is tongue-in-cheek, but the friction around the film is real. Ali G began as a sketch character on Channel 4's The Eleven O'Clock Show in the late 1990s before spinning off into the 2002 feature Ali G Indahouse. The character — a white suburban man adopting a Caribbean-inflected persona — has long drawn accusations of racial stereotyping, even as Cohen's defenders argue the satire targets the ignorance of the character rather than the communities he mimics.
Amazon-MGM's decision to give the revival a full theatrical release, rather than routing it straight to streaming, signals a bet that audiences will still turn out for Cohen's provocation on the big screen. Whether the boycott campaign affects bookings in the weeks before opening remains an open question — though at this point, no exhibitor has budged.
