Lionsgate to hold LGBT benefit premiere for Ender’s Game, would like to remind you it only adapted Orson Scott Card's book

By Kevin McFarland | July 12, 2013 | 9:40pm

Aux Features Film

Though it doesn’t hit theaters until October, Lionsgate’s long-gestating adaptation of Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game has become increasingly embattled as its promotional campaign winds up. Card’s patronizingly unremorseful and curt statement on the more vocal responses to his homophobic views did nothing to calm calls for a boycott of the film. And now Lionsgate, which had already left Card out of the upcoming panel at Comic-Con, has gone a step further by releasing an official statement distancing the studio and film from Card’s views, which they say are "completely irrelevant" to the $110 million dollar sci-fi epic it would like people to see this fall.

Citing past productions like Gods And Monsters and The Perks Of Being A Wallflower, and playing up its internal policies recognizing same-sex unions and domestic partnership in employee benefits, the studio further announced it would hold a charity premiere of Ender's Game to benefit LGBT causes. Card is presumably grumbling about all this somewhere, but it’s a savvy and rationally compassionate gesture from a studio looking to calm the outrage before it gets out of control.