The Chinese box office reached $6.8 Billion USD last year compared to $11 Billion for the US box office but it grew by 50% in a single year. China has 31,627 compared to the US’ 39,000 in 2014 but 8000 screens were installed in 2014 which means that China may have already exceeded the number of screens by today.
Furthermore, China is not a free market for Western movies, China is using protectionism to protect its domestic movie industry as it grows so the number of movies and when they are allowed to screen in China is heavily controlled by the government.
However you dice the numbers, just Chinese racists alone already has or will soon dwarf the impact American racists have from a purely business perspective. If you’re preparing a slate of movies to come out as far as 2020 as Marvel is doing, you need to be taking these things into account and while “the whites” will be a factor in your decision, “the yellows” will be a much larger factor.
At the same time, I don’t think he’s talking about situations where people say “A Black guy is in it?! I’m not seeing it!” and more like how boys often don’t read books with female protagonists because those are automatically seen as “for girls”.
Was this a real controversy or one of those clickbait bullshit controversies? Like when it was widely reported that mens right organisations boycotted Fury Road for being too feminist when it was literally just one angry asshole ranting on his blog.
I think this goes back to the misconception among Asians that soul brother too beaucoup.
First it was no boom-boom with soul brother, now it affects box office revenue as well.
I have one problem with Maher’s theory though: If producers are that worried about the Asian market, then wouldn’t they be casting more Asians in lead roles? Is a white face just something everyone can agree on or something, whereas a black face would turn off Asian audiences and an Asian face would turn off American audiences?
The actual “controversy” was almost certainly manufactured but you also have to ask, how was it able to be manufactured in the first place? That is, why did it take 24 bond films before bond even slept with an older woman?
And the answer to that is the people who object to those things don’t rant about them loudly on the Internet, they simply just go see a different movie. By and large, these people are not the 1950s style sexists that is a part of the popular imagination and I’m willing to bet most of them would be virulently opposed to having the label sexist placed upon them. But the end result of their collective action is a movie world that’s far less friendly towards ageing female actors than male ones.
The Bond franchise made a semi-calculated gamble that, for the first time, the publicity generated by “OMG older woman” (which if you see the movie, felt shoehorned in purely to generate the outrage) finally outweighed the downside of alienating the more conservative audience. But it took over 50 years of Bond films to get us to this point.
Similarly, the racism counterbalance that Asia is providing isn’t cross burning and boycotts, it’s the collective minute actions of a large population that makes it far more difficult to be a black actor in hollywood than a white one and the rise of Asia will make progress on this front slower for a significant number of years.
While I agree that the bias against older women in films is both real and shitty, Bond has slept with older women before. Both Honor Blackman (Pussy Galore) and Diana Rigg are older than Connery and George Lazenby. On the other hand, as Connery got older the women stayed about the same age. In A view to a kill Roger Moore was older than than his co-star’s (Tanya Roberts) mother.
I’ve heard it before. Sounds like a cheap excuse. I mean, it’s not like studios are putting a lot of Asian leads either, if Asian racism was that relevant.
I don’t have any trouble with that at all. If we’re talking sterotypes, which we are, then culturally Asians - Indian/Pakistani Asians across to Vietnamese/Japanese Asians - are really very prejudiced.
Basically, the last 50 years never happened.
Tbf, the only reason the US is any different is because a chunk of the population is black, some even have jobs and money now (though 1 in 3 black US males will go to prison at some point in their lives).
I really have no idea what weird, liberal fantasy worlds some of you people live in.
The Washington Post on the “one in three” estimate (that Bernie Sanders has used):
Gosh, “a few” black men even have jobs? I’d rather live in the real world than the racist fantasy. Thanks for letting us now the stereotypes you live by.
Bill Maher has never been a studio executive. So he has no experience marketing movies. At best, he may have heard second or third hand accounts of what actual studio executives have said. And it strikes me that if I was a studio executive being pressured for my reluctance to hire black actors, blaming Asians is exactly the kind of excuse I’d come up with. It’s a racist excuse for racist behavior.
I don’t have to respect the man. It doesn’t take any “balls” to do what he does. He’s a talk show host and people pay him millions of dollars to say stupid things like this.
AFAIK without watching him except for very occasional network talk show appearances, I agree with him more often than not, but it doesn’t take balls to do what he does. Saying outrageous stuff is very easy, and very profitable for many. Look at Trump. Look at right wing radio.
According to this list, Pacific Rim (where one of the main leads, good-guys authority figure Stacker Pentecost, is played by black actor Idris Elba) did very well in China. Even bigger were Avengers: Age of Ultron, with three important named-cast black actors, Samuel L. Jackson, Anthony Mackie, and Don Cheadle, and Captain America: Winter Soldier, where Mackie had a bigger role.
Indian audiences also likedAge of Ultron as well as 2012, in which one of the main leads is Chiwetel Ejiofor and another key character is Thandie Newton, playing the daughter of the black US President (Danny Glover).
So while I concur that Asian audiences are probably not particularly interested in watching Hollywood movies about the ordinary lives of western black people (or western white people, for that matter), I see no reason to think that Asian audiences would be particularly averse to seeing black lead actors in the sort of Hollywood movies that they typically do like to watch, i.e., big blockbuster action/disaster movies.
It’s funny that while we’re talking about how racist the industry is to blacks, we’re not talking about how it’s a lot more racist to minorities other than blacks. If you’re going to go down the list of races represented as leading men and women in Hollywood, it would be white first, blacks second, and everyone else WAY down the list. Can you even name a leading Asian actor who isn’t a martial arts star?
Seems to me that Asians and Latinos and Arabs have a much better case against the academy than African-Americans.