A decade-long grievance has been quietly resolved ahead of La La Land‘s tenth-anniversary theatrical re-release. Lionsgate has unveiled an updated promotional poster that corrects the hand position Ryan Gosling has famously disliked since the film’s original 2016 debut.
Damien Chazelle’s musical romance, which earned Emma Stone a Best Actress Oscar and Chazelle a Best Director award—alongside its infamous Best Picture envelope mix-up with Moonlight—returns to cinemas next month. To mark the occasion, the studio addressed a detail Gosling dubbed “La La Hand”: his wrist bent awkwardly, hand held flat mid-dance with Stone.
In a 2024 interview with The Wall Street Journal, Gosling admitted he ignored on-set advice to keep his hand raised. “I thought it would be cool to put my hand [flat] even though everyone told me it wasn’t cool,” he said. “It just killed the energy that way.”
Lionsgate acknowledged the fix in a statement: “Over the years, Ryan Gosling has noted on more than one occasion that he would love to fix his ‘La La hand’ from the original poster… Well, Ryan, you have been heard! Lionsgate is thrilled to announce that an updated version of the poster is now officially available.”
The revision avoids the heavy-handed digital retouching that plagues modern movie marketing. Yet it also raises a quiet question: when a cultural artifact is altered post-facto to satisfy its star, does it create a collective false memory—a Mandela Effect—where audiences misremember the original? The original poster existed for ten years. Now, it hasn’t.
Gosling’s limp wrist is gone. Whether the correction improves the image or merely rewrites history is a matter of perspective.
