Peace sign pulled from a movie ad

Sensitive to the potential for misunderstanding about the movie “What a Girl Wants,” Warner Bros. has revised the print ad campaign, replacing the peace sign flashed by star Amanda Bynes with a more neutral pose. The movie opens Friday.

In the new ads, a cheerful Bynes is still standing between two unsmiling British royal guards, but instead of making the V-shaped gesture, her hand has been lowered and is on her hip.

“It was a marketing decision,” made to preempt any interpretation that the company was taking a side in the Iraqi war, says a Warner Bros. Pictures spokeswoman. “Some people think, what does it mean? Are they against the war or is it a V for victory?” she says. The movie, a teen comedy about an American girl who travels to London to find her long-lost father, isn’t war-related or even political, she says, and shouldn’t have any “war-related perception associated with it.”

The revised ads appeared in newspapers across the country over the weekend. The original image still appears on billboards and in theater posters, which require a longer lead time and have less flexibility than newspapers, she says. Variations of the same image also appear on Web sites.

The studio spokeswoman said the company has received no complaints about the posters or billboards. It is common for marketing departments to revise newspaper ads, the spokeswoman says. On Friday, the ad will change again, with the guards removed to make way for review quotes.

Bynes, 16, will still be shown wearing a tank top imprinted with an American flag.

--Lynn Smith