What do you think of diversity in Movies?

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I think this is a good set of first principles, but that there's potentially a bit more to it if you look at it from a slightly different perspective.

Firstly, how do we know whether "the people best suited" are actually being cast? The obvious starting point is whether the industry as a whole roughly represents the wider population. I think it's safe to say that currently it doesn't - men have more speaking roles, are more likely to play the lead character in most genres, and are overwhelmingly more likely to be in the director's chair. There's also a skew towards white actors, with black men also being fairly well represented although you might criticise the "quality" of that representation.

Secondly, are we disproportionately telling stories from a certain perspective? Sure, maybe it makes sense to cast a white guy as Superman, Batman, Spider Man, Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, Doctor Strange, and Ant Man... but maybe it would be more interesting, and more commercially successful, if you threw Black Panther in there, or made it so that the Doctor Strange scenes set in Asian countries actually had an Asian cast. If you're only providing opportunities for white people, even if each of those opportunities is individually justified by the story, then you're not really providing equal opportunities.

Thirdly, the social and economic value of diversity. On the social level, being represented gives people a thrill - look at WrongPlanet's love for autistic characters for an immediate example, but there are so many. That's an incredibly valuable thing that we should look to promote. Less importantly, we learn from what we see. That's particularly true of children, but we're all damn impressionable beings. If we only ever see young women in "damsel in distress" or "inaccessible goddess" roles, then that feeds into a slight subconscious bias. If we get to see women in a whole range of roles, then we can fill a more rounded and less prejudiced idea of what women look like.

And economically, this is beneficial to film studios. 18 months ago, I would have told you that Marvel Cinematic Universe films made about $800m for solo films and $1bn+ for team-up films, with one specific exception. Since then, I've been proven badly wrong by Black Panther and now in all probability Captain Marvel. Black Panther made an utterly ridiculous $1.3bn, and Captain Marvel is very likely to make over $1bn. I'm sure there would be an element of diminishing returns, but representing the under-represented can be very valuable to film studios.

Walrus I think your post had a lot of good points and I wanted to add my perspective to them as someone who follows the movie industry pretty closely.

It's impossible to know whether the best person was cast. We can only evaluate how well a certain actor played a role. Robert Downey Jr. is American, Will Ferrell is American. They both played a british superhero named Sherlock Holmes. By most accounts Robert Downey Jr. did a good job while Will Ferrell did an awful one.

To take some race/gender swapped roles. I thought Samuel Jackson has done an excellent job portraying Nick Fury, and Jeffrey Wright did a good job portraying Felix Leighter. Similarly Katee Sackhoff as Starbuck and Tilda Swinton as the ancient one I thought portrayed their roles well. In the case of Tilda Swinton maybe there was a better Asian actor/actress to portray the role, but I have no way of knowing.



For whatever reason humans want to see heroes that look like them. I think it's a good thing to have more diverse heroes, but I dislike taking older characters and changing their race/gender for diversity sake. For example I have no problems if Idris Elba got cast as James Bond, because I think Idris Elba would make a fantastic James Bond. That said I don't think we should cast a black James Bond because "It's time." A better approach is to write new action heroes (like Denzel Washington's The Equalizer) if we want to make them a specific race or gender. The danger of course is that said character comes off as minority knock-off version of the original, but that's on the strength of the writers to differentiate them and not make it so. Deadpool was a copy of Deathstroke, but who is more famous now?



I don't think diverse lead films are inherently unpopular/unprofitable, but I think they're having a moment right now due to novelty factor. An example of this is with the 3D phenomenon. Avatar made an astonishing 2.5 Billion dollars mostly on its new 3D technology. Alice in Wonderland not soon later made 1 billion dollars also capitalizing on the 3D phenomenon. Alice Through the Looking Glass made a paltry 299.5 million dollars. We still haven't gotten James Cameron's Avatar 2, but it won't do close to the business of its predecessor.

I expect Black Panther 2 to be a profitable film, but I expect it to collapse down to normal MCU sequel level territory. Ditto for Captain Marvel. Unfortunately people will read way too much into it politically instead of just "the novelty wore off."

It may be incredibly shallow to like the way Captain Marvel does her hair, but isn't this all fantasy to begin with?

Back in the Nineties I heard a Black stand up comic talk about welcoming Hollywood diversity, but he got a laugh from me and the studio audience when he added "but Robin Hood's band of merry men doesn't HAVE to include a Brother- we Blacks understand"( referring to Morgan's Freeman character as one of Kevn Costner's band of Merry Men in Sherwood Forest).

That pretty much sums it up.

Lack of diversity was a problem. Nowadays they occasionally go overboard with the opposite - and have gratuitous diversity. But I dont see how that's a big problem.

With growing equality in American society that is ethnically diverse, it own makes sense that TV and the movies reflect that fact. The only people seriously opposed to this appears to be a bunch of white nationalist neck beard trolls who attack popular entertainment from the anonymity of the computers in their mothers' basements.

Diversity is needed with how things are changing but I would like for it to matter not just to have it for the sake of it. Then again that is much better than none

Diversity in historical settings do not necessary "don't fit" historically: you could, for example, do a black character in middle ages Europe and still be historically accurate, blacks were very in rare in Europe back then, but they did exist as luck, destiny or necessities of life brought some there. There was also a knight being black in medieval Arthurian literature, but the character didn't made it through the centuries.
There was even a real historical black samurai.

Considering that genetic testing on the remains of one person interred in a Roman era cemetery in Britain revealed black African descent, it's a good guess that the cosmopolitan world without borders of the Roman Empire had allowed a great degree of ethnic diversity that has long been underestimated.

Absolutely.

It may not be necessesary….to" include a Brother" among Robin Hood's band of men. But it doesn't really hurt anything to do that either.

Even in ancient times individuals born on every continent found themselves living on other continents. And yes- there IS a "Black Moor" character , a Muslim knight from Africa, in the Arthurian cycle who is a very similar to Morgan Freeman's character in Costner's Robin Hood movie. And its not really all that implausible that a real Black Moor dude might have ended up living among the riff raff in Sherword Forest in the Twelfth Century.

Marvel has brought on director Destin Daniel Cretton to helm a film about kung fu master and superhero Shang-Chi. It will be the first Asian-led superhero film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe franchise.
https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/13/1826 ... n-led-film

I loved the Shang-Chi comics as a kid! It was especially cool that he was the son of the insidious Dr. Fu Man Chu.