I call bullshit on that. No one would call a supervillain, a Dr. Doom style megalomaniac with genius-level intellect, limitless money and a tortured past some personification of a racist stereotype.
Making him a run-of-the-mill mortal villain, say a Kingpin-style underworld boss or a Joker-esque psycho killer would be a easy target, but you just need to be slightly creative to make it work.
“Steve Rogers discovers that Dr. Whatsisname was forced (Or lose all funding) to experiment on black soldiers before Steve got the Super-Soldier Serum. Most ended…‘badly’…but with one soldier it was a success. Of course the govt. wouldn’t let him serve and tried to keep him behind lines. But this soldier would have none of it, went rogue and was never heard from again after rescuing an entire batallion. The US covered it up.”
Fictional characters are enormously malleable. Look at the way characters have been repeatedly rewritten over the centuries and millennia – Herakles, Beowulf, Merlin – I’d say that you could boil each one down to something very basic, and even then twist them.
What’s Bond, at base? A spy and an assassin who works for a major power, who uses cool gadgets, has many sexual encounters, and is terrible at concealing es identity. Everything else can be easily changed. And even these few elements can be played with to recreate Bond.
I’ll have to watch it again. I thought it was a great movie, but I’m not an actor stalker and probably didn’t realize that anyone was playing someone out of their race, simply because I don’t know who they are in real life.
I don’t think there’s anything you can do that won’t piss someone off. There were some Asians who were pissed off about Crazy Rich Asians because one of the actors was half-Asian. I heard one woman on television remark about how disappointed she was because she wasn’t watching Crazy Rich Half-Asians. The Ancient One was played by a white woman in Dr. Strange to avoid not only Asian stereotypes here in the US but avoid any problems with China given their relationship with Tibet.
People are complicated. I wasn’t bothered in the list about Alexander Hamilton having a largely black cast. But when I saw they cast a black actor to play Johnny Storm I figured the producers weren’t going to give a damn about making sure the latest Fantastic Four movie would be a good adaptation of the comic. I imagine having a little more diversity in Hollywood would help.
One thing that should be mentioned in the casting of Swinton as “The Ancient One” is that having a Tibetan in the role would have caused problems marketing the film in China. Personally, on the larger topic, I have no problem with race-changing on minor characters, but when you’re dealing with the “majors” it could be another matter. Although we should note that had some of these iconic characters date back so far that making them black initially would have been impossible. I would certainly have no problem with making Ferro Lad black, since that was the creator’s initial intent.
“Completely ignored” by you gringos. In Spain the groans shook the ceiling; I know people who specifically didn’t go to see it because they felt insulted in their national pride. “All those non-Anglos are the same, amirite?” And this includes people who had previously seen any Denzel Washington or any Emma Thompson they could lay hands on.
Critics give the production bad reviews stating that the choice of actor added traits to the character that didn’t fit the story line and diminished the plot. Negative reviews lead to a diminished audience and fewer future opportunities for the director and actors.
I haven’t seen any episodes of the recent TV series Vikings. Were there any non-white Vikings in that production? Would non-white actors have fit in, or would they have caused a suspension of belief that took away from the plot?
Even were all this true, what you’re talking about again is cultural and social prejudices, not anything that goes to whether these choices violate some important standard of validity or art.
And these concerns come very close to the currently embattled claim from commercial producers that “we can’t cast X type person in Y type role because Z type audiences wouldn’t buy it.”
All it takes is one instance of non-traditional decision-making that seems not to hurt a film financially and there goes another so-called natural barrier.
So my point is that the consequence isn’t necessarily that this choice automatically makes this a bad movie, or an unsuccessful one. And it may even be the likely that future audiences, who grow up with this film, will no longer be burdened by an unnecessary bias like “Thor can’t be portrayed by a non-white actor.”
I think the problem with Fantastic 4 (well, that particular problem, at least: The movie had plenty of others) wasn’t so much that Johnny was black, but that Johnny was black while Sue was white. They’re siblings. And yes, it’s possible that one or both of them were adopted, but adoption is something of a Chekov’s Gun: You don’t introduce that a character is adopted unless it’s going to somehow become relevant.
Now, they could have made both of the Storm siblings black. But that would make Reed and Sue an interracial couple, and Hollywood still has taboos about that. Apparently, they consider interracial siblings more reasonable than interracial marriages.
This is just another cultural bias, that the mere fact of possible adoptions in the background or blended families have to become a critical factor in the plot resolution.
I can only imagine how that the fact that this notion is being peddled as a law of fiction would make someone from such a family feel.
You’re ignoring context. Or rather you’re placing it aside as unimportant, whereas I think it’s often critical for a movie. Many, if not most, movies depend on the setting. The characters need to fit into that setting. If the setting is supernatural, the races of the characters don’t really matter. However, if the setting is meant to be in a time and place, the characters need to fit into that time in place. If someone’s doing a samurai movie in 13th century Japan, having some blond white guy playing one of the characters isn’t going to fit in with the setting, even if the white guy is portraying some Japanese god.