Don't forget that he killed the husbando of said hot Japanese girl
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Quartz: Over the last decade, whitewashed movies lost nearly half a billion dollars
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Don't forget that he killed the husbando of said hot Japanese girl
Could've sworn that was on purpose. He gets called out on it a lot over the course of the movie.
Seductivpancakes
Member
How else do you get a waifu?
I think at that point it depends on what side of the pond the bulk of that $467 million was made on. If you made $100 million domestic, and $367 million international, it cuts into your profit, because there are a lot of addition costs, fees, taxes, etc that need to come out of that total. It heavily depends on the country the film is being released in. But yeah, if you can't turn a profit from that kind of gross to budget ratio, then sure, your business should probably be reevaluated.
I agree that the industry is operating with a jacked up mentality. A lot of the problem is that the vast majority of studios are run by old Hollywood money and dynasties. They're stuck in their ways, running the studio based on what worked in the past. It's why you still have studio heads talking about "star power" being the reason why Scarlett Johansson is headlining Ghost in the Shell. Why they're chasing the billion dollar grossers instead of just trying to make good movies. Then you have the filmmakers themselves fighting tooth and nail to get their projects made, while the people holding the purse strings are trying to dictate the project.
The fact that we get any good movies at all is kind of impressive, really. I almost feel like good blockbusters like Star Wars are entirely incidental. Not all smaller films are gold either, but there is a reason why indie films tend to be held in such regard. Seems like less red tape most of the time. Sometimes.
ElBoxyBrown
Banned
It's mostly missed opportunity. These are stories that originated from Asia and don't need white actors to tell them.
lightskintwin
Banned
I mean that's the whole point of adaptations though.
Word of mouth wasn't able to stop it fast enough.
Wag
Member
Maybe they would have bombed harder? (Not that I agree with whitewashing) but having white actors in a film doesn't automatically mean success ... most of those film suck so hard.
Except Ghost in the Shell.
ElBoxyBrown
Banned
It doesn't mean a movie has to cast all white people. If it's an American adaptation then it should represent all of us.
molnizzle
Member
The point of the movie is to show how people are reincarnated repeatedly in different parts of the world. The characters are reincarnated as different races and different genders. The entire schtick of the movie was to show how these same individuals are reincarnated as different people in each new "life."
Have you seen the movie? It's not "explaining away for plot related reasons" when it's the entire point of the movie. If the same actors didn't play the different characters in each era the movie would have no point.
The Fatal Englishman
Member
This is firmly a case of 'correlation does not imply causation'. The vast majority of these underperforming films were critically panned.
I'm not even convinced by GitS. The core fanbase for that franchise was ready to dismiss the live action adaptation outright long before its release.
I'm not even convinced by GitS. The core fanbase for that franchise was ready to dismiss the live action adaptation outright long before its release.
molnizzle
Member
Going by the list, I guess Doctor Strange? Though the movie would have done just as well (or better) with an Asian actor playing the Ancient One.
lightskintwin
Banned
But Death Note has an African American playing L, an Asian American playing Watari, and one of the producers who's also an actor, Masi Oka, who's also Asian American playing a role.
ElBoxyBrown
Banned
But no one is gonna be mad at Doctor Strange. It made money and was decent, why should you be angry at it? People will acknowledge the white washing but that's it and won't go in-depth of how problematic it is. Meanwhile bad movies will be dismissed as bad movies but white washing will always be the last thing that needs addressing when talking about it's problems. It's a never ending cycle of trying to avoid discussion.
But the main character is another white dude.
I still believe that people would have a problem with an Asian man or woman playing the Ancient one. Asian person playing master to a white man coming to learn all their shit faster and better than they did? That concept alone already doesn't sound good. Going with a woman was a good idea, going with a white woman was gonna be a problem. Going with another minority woman as the Ancient One would've likely worked with no problem.
lightskintwin
Banned
100 million dollar independently funded film. I loved Cloud Atlas. The yellowface to me is less of an issue given the themes of the film, however it becomes an issue in execution in how terrible their representation for Asians appeared. They looked like Aliens.
molnizzle
Member
When you put it like that... yeah, that woulda been bad.
Kind of a difficult situation there. No matter what race you cast for the teacher, the hotshot white guy is still coming in and showing everybody up.
Not sure what they should have done now to be honest.
They definitely did a shitty-ass job with the Asian makeup, but I'm not sure if it's even possible to do a good job. I don't think there are many modern makeup artists who are experienced in doing yellowface. Maybe they wanted to use CG but just didn't have the budget? I dunno.
SuperSonic1305
Member
Dragonball Evolution was white washed? Master Roshi and ChiChi were asian and Goku is an alien.
lightskintwin
Banned
OK, but you just moved the field goal posts. I would also argue L's character is just as important as Lights.
ElBoxyBrown
Banned
With good writing no one would have had a problem with an asian woman playing the ancient one.
The main protagonist (and antagonist) of Death Note is Light. That's the character the story mainly revolves around and is what the movie is gonna focus on.
robotzombie
Member
Yeah but piccolo wasn't played by a black guy
I know all this already. I've seen this film.
As an Asian American who saw it in theaters with Asian American friends, all of us felt humiliated.
The Fatal Englishman
Member
That character is a minefield no matter how you look at it. Leaving aside the fact that the original character is mildly racist in the first place, a Tibetan character is never going to fly when the largest money-maker for Marvel films is the mainland Chinese market. Changing the character to a Han Chinese ethnicity carries its own political implications as well.
From a pure marketing perspective, doing away with the issue altogether and simply changing the context of the Ancient One to some sort of nebulous Celtic mysticism has the dual benefits of freeing them to hire an A-list actor while (largely) mitigating political fallout.
lightskintwin
Banned
No doubt, but you already know that's what it is over here. LOL
Zoe
Member
Kapoor was originally supposed to be played by Irrfan Khan. He had to decline, and Ejiofor was a last minute cast. They addressed this in the movie by making him half-Indian.
molnizzle
Member
How would you have had them do it? Just not make the movie?
lightskintwin
Banned
Honestly they were better off getting Asian actors and using make up and prostheticcs if need be to look like the actor/character's facial features reincarnated and dubbing over their voices.
Zoe
Member
There's no way a viewer would make the connection like that. Some of the roles were already hard to discern using the same actors.
molnizzle
Member
I dunno. I absolutely adore Cloud Atlas, and my favorite part is the very end pre-credits sequence when they show all the different characters that were played by the same actor. A few of those credits were a real "holy shit" moment for me that I didn't catch during my initial watch, I literally went and sat through all 3 hours again because of it. It'd be a lot less special if there had just been different actors playing certain characters just because.
The makeup they used was terrible though. I have to imagine it was possible to do a better job than that.
Oh, I dunno, maybe not try to make your characters look like gross caricatures? Especially when Bae Doona's eyes look nothing like that?
But of course it's easier to just dismiss the complaints as uppity minorities stifling creativity.
lightskintwin
Banned
kunonabi
Member
None of that makes cruise a samurai. The text of the film and the history of samurai culture and philosophy don't support cruise being the last samurai in any way, shape, or form.
Maybe Bulma...but then you got to consider she was born in West City and the planet's geography is different from our earth anyways.
Edit: Also the naming scheme for the entire family.
Rest
All these years later I still chuckle at what a fucking moron that guy is.
I definitely thought they were aliens, I was most of the way through that part of the movie when I saw Keith David dressed as a monk and realized they were supposed to be Koreans. Absolute failure in that regard.
lightskintwin
Banned
LOL OK. Compelling rebuttal. As David Poland so astutely put it, It's a film that pretends to be anti-imperialist but couldn't be more imperialist through Tom Cruise's charachter.
The whole narrative and subtext of the film completely supports his character as The Last Samurai.
Calm waterfall
Banned
The movie that flopped, flopped because they were crap not because of whitewashing lol.
It's fair (though odd because it's original casting was screwed up too). Take a look at how they depict Khan in the episode of the original series that he was introduced in("Space Seed").
If Edge of Tomorrow is on that list, then why isn't The Departed? You can't cherry pick data like that!
Yeah, it's more blackface than whitewashing.
It's strange how often the two go hand in hand though.
As if the very act of whitewashing implies a certain carelessness on part of the production side that leads to bad movies??
ElBoxyBrown
Banned
So the white washing was fine?
Warm Machine
Member
My best friend in school growing up was named Gavin Singh. He was half East Indian and half white British. He also had a sister. He looked mostly East Indian, his sister completely Caucasian. He died when he was 19 years old of cancer and I later named my son after him. Now the thing about names, in the far future is that they will sooner or later bear absolutely no relation to the race of the holder of the name due to how couples will inevitably mix. Hell, my brothers children are half white and half Chinese and they have my family name.
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