As we as a society start to take the thoughts and feelings of people who don’t look like the typical Doper into account, they are going to present points of view that challenge assumptions you’ve been making about the world. This includes things like Snow White and y’all are just going to have to get fucking used to it.
When you don’t, and have a knee jerk pro-conventional wisdom, pro establishment freak out like this, it’s fucking depressing and makes this place seem so very old and stagnant.
This is the Disney model now. Leveraging the name familiarity of pre-existing properties is deemed less risky than attempting to develop a new concept and then explain and sell it to the public.
This is how a middling animated film like 101 Dalmatians gets a live-action remake (and a sequel) followed by the dumb “reinvention” Cruella (which itself followed the same path that was established when they took the villain from Sleeping Beauty and gave her an “antihero girlboss” spin).
The CGI Lion King from a couple of years ago did absolutely nothing that was better than the cel-animated original, and it did a number of things that were wretchedly terrible from an objective standpoint without any consideration of the original film. However, it made over a billion dollars, because the vast moviegoing public is incomprehensibly satisfied simply to look at things they recognize. So on we will continue to roll.
Disney has done this with Dumbo,Lady and the Tramp,Beauty and the Beast,Jungle Book,Aladdin,Mulan, and on and on and on. There is no factor of “relevance” in any of this. It’s about greasing the skids of commercial marketability, and it was inevitable that they’d get to Snow White eventually. You won’t be surprised to learn that Little Mermaid and Pinocchio are already in the works. But you may be baffled to hear that Bambi and Lilo & Stitch are also getting the same treatment.
This is just how things are now. Sucks balls, but as long as the bleating hordes keep showing up for empty, repetitive nonsense, it isn’t going to stop.
What’s funny is that of this list, only Lady and the Tramp is actually an original piece of work from Disney. The rest of these were all derivative of older works to begin with, along with Snow White, Bambi, 101 Dalmations, Little Mermaid and Pinocchio. This isn’t a Disney Now thing, it’s how Disney has always been.
I read that as “Halle Berry” and I would have agreed that casting a 55-year-old as a young mermaid would have been awful (though Berry still looks fantastic for her age). But different actress, never mind. Bailey seems like a fine choice to me.
Yes, it’s a natural point of confusion. But it will come as no surprise that casting a non-white girl as a fictional creature that was green in the original (written) story is being seen as a bad thing in certain quarters.
Apparently so. I mean, I personally am fine with the casting, although I find the whole story objectionable for reasons that have nothing to do with anyone’s color and am unlikely to watch the film.
This seems like a likely spot for this (mostly tongue-in-cheek) question:
People get upset when a straight person is cast in a gay role, or a hearing person in a deaf role, or any number of other cases (some more clearly objectionable than others, but in all cases it is called “acting” for a reason). Why is it OK to cast good-looking English/Australian people as good-looking Americans?
Well written characters of whatever persuasion or disability can be done. Heck Mr. Dinklage himself is a good example of this.
My problem is inclusion simply for the sake of inclusion. Does the Human Torch in the Fantastic Four movie advance human rights? Or is he there simply to appeal to SJWs? Is there even a point in deviating from the original character?
