People on the internet have been yelling about Hollywood being too woke for what seems like forever. Some even celebrate the Top Gun sequel because of its white maleness.
That got me wondering, so I looked up the top 25 movies so far this year on BoxOfficeMojo, all those which have grossed $20 million or more in the U.S. These are the results, with my comments on who the star(s) is.
|1|Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness| - straight white male
|2|The Batman| - straight white male
|3|Top Gun: Maverick| - straight white male
|4|Spider-Man: No Way Home| - straight white male
|5|Sonic the Hedgehog 2| - cartoon
|6|Uncharted| - straight white male
|7|The Lost City| - straight white couple
|8|Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore| - straight white male
|9|The Bad Guys|- cartoon
|10|Sing 2|- cartoon
|11|Scream| - straight white female
|12|Morbius| - straight white male
|13|Dog| - straight white male
|14|Everything Everywhere All at Once| Asian females
|15|Jackass Forever| - straight white male
|16|Death on the Nile| - straight white male
|17|Downton Abbey: A New Era| - straight white male
|18|The Northman| - straight white male
|19|The Bob’s Burgers Movie| - cartoon
|20|Marry Me| - straight white couple
|21|Ambulance| - straight white male
|22|Jujutsu Kaisen 0: The Movie| - cartoon
|23|The King’s Man|- straight white male
|24|Father Stu|- straight white male
|25|The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent|- straight white male
I’m taking some of the descriptions from summaries. Obviously Downton Abbey and Death on the Nile have ensemble casts, but IMBd lists males as the leads and the casts and plots are hardly woke. Even if I got one description wrong, that won’t tip the scales.
Is this just Hollywood being Hollywood? Are the audiences forcing their hands? Is this an odd sample that will change over the course of the year? No idea.
But with one exception, movies with the most charitable definition of “woke” are running less than half a percent of the box office. Change is slow.
Looking at the IMDb page for Maverick, it sure seems to me that they did the usual diversity casting. There are several non-white characters, put in where they would make sense for the story they’re going for.
The stuff I’ve seen people get upset about tends to be when their beloved franchise that was all white suddenly isn’t. So I don’t get why they celebrate Maverick at all.
Still, there’s nothing particularly new or “woke” about having deaf protagonists in movies, or making their marginalization a major theme of the movie. See also: Children of a Lesser God (1986), The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter (1968), etc., including masses of works about Helen Keller.
ISTM that what gets called “woke” nowadays is anything subverting the traditional Hollywood practice of presenting everybody (at least the good guys) as straight and cisgender, with the dominant character being a straight white man. With occasional exceptions for an emotional domestic drama centered on a straight white woman.
Complaints about “woke” Hollywood are something I tend to see online but have never encountered in the wild. I didn’t hear anyone complain that Rue from The Hunger Games was too black, that Finn and Rey from the latest Star Wars movies were playerd by a black man and a white woman, and nobody in meatspace has complained about Moses Igram in the Obi-Wan Kenobi series.
Do you live in the US, specifically a Red state? I remember having to show a gaggle of white girls at work passages from Hunger Games on my phone, and a chorus of “Ooooh” sounds when I pointed out that Rue and Thresh’s District is pretty much described as a plantation.
More than that, people talk about cancelling Netflix because of all the “wokeness” when it’s a fairly small percentage, easily avoided.
And investment forums are pretty conservative, and there are tons of posts lately crowing that companies like Netflix and Disney “got woke, went broke” despite the entire market being down this year…
I live in Arkansas and I still see Trump 2020 signs. To me, there’s a difference between someone not making the connection between plantations and Hunger Games and someone complaining that Rue was too black in the movie. Of all the people I know who read the books and saw the movies, I never heard one of them complain that Rue was too black. This was strictly an online phenomenon to me.
I’m not surprised you see that online, I do too, but I’ve never really seen it in person. Aside: I’ve heard people complain about D&D going woke and repeating “go woke, go broke,” which is odd given that the game has never been more popular than it is now.
Well, of course it’s just complaints online. I don’t hang around with the sort of person who would say things like that.
Are you implying that you are surrounded by people who say things like that so frequently that the absence of such comments in this case says something about the rarity of this opinion on Holywood? Otherwise why would you bring up the “not in person” part?
I think studio movies are the epitome of woke. By which I mean they are the quintessential caricature of progressiveness, offering mere tokenisms in a strained endeavor to appear fashionable to midstream audiences and so eek out just a little more profit by way of inclusion. It costs Disney as much to show two men sharing a peck upon the lips for a split second as it does a man and a woman, and if push comes to shove they can always edit those few frames out for “select markets.” Meanwhile, the free press it buys them, whether in the form of approbation or condemnation, is, well, free.
They are often woke, but seldom (though not exactly never) truly progressive.
According to the IMDB (Russian I assume)pinhead comments about the FBI franchise, “Woke” means having plots that treat everyone equally. Having Muslim characters that aren’t one-dimensional terrorists. Having gay people respected.
And, ironically, having white people as the bad guys. That really gets their white goat. I guess prior to ten ish years ago, movies and TV never had straight and/or white baddies.
I feel when people complain about “Woke” movies they’re complaining when movies insert scenes that are completely unnecessary and wind up ruining the movie. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom’s entire disaster of an ending (which most people complain about) is entirely because the writer REALLY hated Donald Trump. Literally, that’s why the ending of that movie is a bunch of rich people having a secret auction where they bid on dinosaurs, because it was supposed to represent Republican politics of buying politicians.
Similarly, the disaster of Wonder Woman 84 basically revolves around the writers REALLY wanted to make the bad guy a Donald Trump analogue despite the fact it doesn’t help the film at all.
That’s an interesting and more subtle definition of “woke”. The uses I’ve seen of the word, all as a pejorative stereotype from the conservative “anti-woke” side (I know the term originated as a non-pejorative descriptor but I haven’t seen it used that way in years), imply that it means fanatically and radically progressive, throwing away all moderation or pecuniary advantage to adhere to The Cause.
As you note, it’s pretty ridiculous to apply such an interpretation to mainstream media’s very cautious pandering to current demands for improved inclusion and diversity. But the conservatives I see using the term “woke” really don’t seem able to tell the difference between putting a same-sex couple among the extras in the background of one scene (or for that matter voluntarily discontinuing the reprinting of an old children’s book containing some racist stereotypes) and being a literally fringe-extremist Social Justice Warrior whose constant presence at BLM socialist pro-immigrant legal weed and free love rallies is only interrupted by having to go home to ferment your vegan organic tofu and read gay-and-trans indoctrination bedtime stories to your children, who are named Mulberry and Lenin.
I’ve never heard the “too black” line. The complaints I heard was that the Rue character was black, period. A lot of white people seemed to miss that in the book. The large, violent, scary Thresh? That, I saw no complaints about, online or in person.
Talking to people around here, wokeness is a progressive agenda that, by acknowledging that the world doesn’t consist of just straight white Christians, attempts to diminish that group. The reaction is similar to how the BLM movement is seen to indicate white lives matter less.
Both views are understandable - equality isn’t a great deal for the privileged, and frustratingly they can’t acknowledge that they’re losing anything because the narrative as long been that things are already equal.
This is the bit I don’t really get. It’s a movie. If you don’t like it, for any reason (regardless if that reason is that it is genuinely ‘too woke’, or if that reason is that it’s not actually ‘woke’, and you are just a racist), it’s a movie. It’s optional. Don’t watch it. Losing your shit seems like kind of a weird thing to do.