As soon as the clip started, I was kinda hoping it would get a mention. And it did: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XebG4TO_xss
As soon as the clip started, I was kinda hoping it would get a mention. And it did: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XebG4TO_xss
Exactly. If Paramount wanted the movie to have more white actors, they should have adapted a cartoon based ENTIRELY about white people. Either that, or stick with animation. Not that it helps with diversity.
Yeah...not gonna deny that the voice cast could have been more diverse, but the VAs are irrelevant to what's appropriate live-action casting for animated characters who are coded as eastern Asian (Aang and Zuko) and Inuk (the Watersibs).
You're missing the big picture. John Oliver of Last Week Tonight brought up "whitewashing" to explain why there are so few movie roles for PoC actors that we ended up having #OscarSoWhite for two years in a row. What he didn't tell you is that ever since the racebending backlash, studios have been favoring scripts and source materials that feature mostly white characters, because having a white character played by PoC actor is "whitewashing" but a PoC character played by white actor is "progress". When Adam Goodman took over Paramount,[1] he shelved the sequels for THAT reason, and bought TMNT for $60M using the money originally set aside for the sequels. He also bought the rights to a YA fantasy novel An Ember In The Ashes[2] before it was even published for seven-figure deal,[3] just because the main characters are WHITE.[4] The other live-action Nickelodeon Movie he approved (other than TMNT) is MONSTER TRUCKS, also with mostly white cast. How does this help PoC actors to get more roles in Hollywood? Apparently, not so great that Spike Lee slammed the studios for not greenlighting more movies with PoC characters.[5]
But that's not even the best part. After Adam Goodman was replaced with Marc Evans,[6] the exec who was in charge of the movie production, Evans didn't only brought M.Night back to head up the development of the movie sequels/reboots,[7] but he also approved to have Paramount co-finance (and handle international distribution of) GHOST IN THE SHELL live-action movie,[8] which his predecessor previously avoided because of this little "whitewashing" problem.[9] And just recently, Paramount worked out with Disney to completely take over distribution of GHOST IN THE SHELL.[10] Why would Viacom want to invest anything in ATLA/Korra only to have it interfere with promotion of GHOST IN THE SHELL (like how it interfered with white Shredder)? I don't know, but I'm grabbing my popcorn.
Deist Zealot wrote: Yeah...not gonna deny that the voice cast could have been more diverse, but the VAs are irrelevant to what's appropriate live-action casting for animated characters who are coded as eastern Asian (Aang and Zuko) and Inuk (the Watersibs).
This is a much more tactful way of saying what I meant.
Aaaaand this is precisely why I was unable to mask my irritation with you. This "You created racism by talking about racism!" thing is NOT "the big picture," it's a tired old excuse at best.
Also, once again, you torpedo your own claim. According to the bolded part, if movie makers were being driven by perceptions of racist casting, what we would expect them to be doing is picking up scripts with a lot of white characters & simply changing arbitrary characters' races. Consequently, we WOULD see a spike in roles of characters of other races. That's not what they're doing (do NOT respond with a handful of cherry picked examples, I know you're thinking about it), it's not even what I think they should do, what I'm saying is simply that you have outlined a testable theory which fails the conditions that YOU YOURSELF laid out for it.
If you don't cite a specific quote that explicitly says this, I'm counting it as another lie.
Of course, even if you provide that, your other claims' only sources are your own rampant speculation.