Ali G's comeback faces a boycott — Sacha Baron Cohen answered with a Sydney Sweeney joke

Sacha Baron Cohen arrived at the Los Angeles premiere of Ali G: Who Iz I? on Wednesday night as Ali G, yellow tracksuit and gold chain, and was asked what he made of the proposed merger between Paramount and Warner Bros. The reply: "The only merger that's happening tonight is me and Sydney Sweeney's babylons." Babylons, for anyone who missed 2000, is Ali G for breasts. By Thursday morning the line was being called gross and misogynistic and people were asking whether this humour has any place in 2026.

The film opens on 23 October through Amazon MGM Studios. It's Baron Cohen's feature directing debut, shot Borat-style on people who didn't know they were in a film, and it arrives with a campaign already stacked against it.

The campaign that got there first

On 26 August, days after the trailer dropped, the media monitoring platform NewsCord started emailing cinema chains on behalf of anyone who signed up, asking them not to screen the film. By that Friday it claimed more than 36,000 emails. The charge is that the satire is "cover for enforcing racist stereotypes", and it's as old as the character:

• 1998: Ali G debuts on Channel 4's The 11 O'Clock Show.
• 2000: comedian Felix Dexter says the character "allows the liberal middle classes to laugh at Black street culture".
• August 2026: Afua Hirsch answers the trailer with "Black people don't dress like that anymore."
• Same week: NewsCord announces Picturehouse has dropped the film. Variety established it was a standard reply to a release query, with no decision made.

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Phil Clapp of the UK Cinema Association told Variety that cinemas "are not there to act as censors or arbiters of public taste". Baron Cohen, meanwhile, had already given his answer to the whole debate:

"In an age when a single comedian's career can be ended by a single un-PC joke, I thought I'd play it safe and bring this guy back."

— Sacha Baron Cohen, on social media

Then, on his own red carpet, he went for Sydney Sweeney. That's not a man worried about the campaign.

The Borat playbook

This is how Baron Cohen has always sold a film. In 2006 Kazakhstan banned Borat and threatened to sue, and the film made $262 million on an $18 million budget. In 2020 the Rudy Giuliani hotel-room scene was all over the news two days before Borat Subsequent Moviefilm landed on Prime Video, on 23 October, and Kazakhstan's tourist board ended up adopting "Very nice!" as a slogan. Both times, the outrage was the marketing.

Ali G didn't dodge the merger question. He picked the answer most likely to end up in Thursday's papers.

The r/popculture thread split exactly along the line the film will be judged on. The top comment: "Much like with Borat, the whole f—ing point is that this character is not a good person and you're supposed to laugh at his stupidity." Further down: "he did the exact same thing with Pamela Anderson 20 years ago. The difference; comedy has changed."

Both are right, and that's the gamble. Borat's targets were the people he fooled. Half the anger at Ali G is aimed at the character himself, and Baron Cohen hasn't adjusted a thing for 2026: same tracksuit, same slang, no apology tour.

On 23 October, six years to the day after Borat's second outing, we find out whether that's a marketing plan or a 28-year-old character running out of road. If it's the first, the Sweeney joke was free publicity. If not, this is the first Baron Cohen film to lose to its own headlines.

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