Forum - View topicNEWS: Live-Action Akira Film Delayed Indefinitely
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Cardcaptor Takato
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jdnation
Posts: 1995 |
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American audiences are fine with Asian casting.
Jackie Chan and Jet Li were huge. Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. Memoirs of a Geisha. Crazy Rich Asians. But there's a big difference here. All of the above are related in big ways with obvious Asian aesthetics or things people associate with Asians. So Kung-Fu or exotic historic epics are an easy sell - this is the same case with Disney's Mulan remake. They aren't going to recast Mulan. Now Science-Fiction on the other hand is a different story. Have there been any cases of Asian-led sci-fi hits? Sci-Fi is already a hard sell, much of it usually involves going Rated-R and also heavy special effects budgets, and the audience is more limited. And this genre needs to be separated from science fantasy like Star Wars. It's a riskier bet, because you even get amazing films like Blade Runner 2049 bombing at the box office even with star power. There's nothing to really indicate whether Scarlet Jo in GITS helped or didn't help. I believe her casting was irrelevant, and people would have already made up their minds about whether to see the movie or not based on the premise and visuals. Bad reviews didn't help. Alita performed better, but was still cutting it very close financially, and the studio obviously doesn't see much merit to trying it again. So sci-fi is a bigger risk. Akira requires a major budget to get right and it's not as simple as going to prosthetics and practical effects and calling it a day. There's an elaborate reason why studios take the FX heavy route despite it costing more that's too much to get into here, but I can see why Akira will be difficult to make and sell and why the studio wants to be too much in control over the creatives and casting decisions. So naturally unlike all of the above films, there is the obvious lazy reason why the studio wants to save costs and set it in America with a bunch of recognizable stars. I don't like it. I think there are creative compromises that would work, like having an Asian cast for the mains, and having recognizable American actors filling in military and government roles, and accommodating the story so that the post WWIII Japan is under American occupation again. All of which will also fit in thematically. So they could shoot it and frame it like they have with post-WWII movies and give the American actors larger roles and go back and forth. So there are workable compromises, but in the end, if GITS and Blade Runner were difficult to sell, then Akira will be even harder. Also regardless of casting, GITS and Alita, were simply not great movies imo. There's stuff to like, but each in its own way had difficiencies that really make you shake your head. As a fan of both franchises, the live action takes were simply passable. I believe Alita would've been better if Cameron had done it rather than passing the buck. Perhaps we'll have better luck with Mobile Suit Gundam from Legendary. That one's more workable considering the diverse cast and settings. And I'd argue that Hollywood could make a pretty good adaptation of Attack on Titan, which I'm sure some studio out there is trying to get their hands on. |
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BadNewsBlues
Posts: 5913 |
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Akira's violence is about as necessary to it's story as Death Note needing to be set in Japan.
MIB International was made on the basis that people wanted a new MIB movie without Will Smith or Tommy Lee Jones it was never destined to be successful.
Which media?
Let's be fair though her recent comments which have opened up a can of snark hasn't helped her.
Something that most mainstream media outlets largely ignored. And was something that was only focused upon by anime & manga fans who were familiar with the original work.
On the one hand hollywood does should cast actual trans people to play trans characters.....on the other actors like Zachary Quinto still plays straight characters from time to time despite having come out ages ago something that not even Nathan Lane does anymore.
I know for a fact that Death Note was getting shat on for whitewashing as early as 2005 when it was still intended to be a box office release. No one really cared about Speed Racer as it's well known that when the original anime was brought over from Japan they Americanized everything so they weren't going to do a adaptation of Mach Go Go Go. Detective Pikachu had no whitewashing since most of the characters even in the original game apparently aren't asian to begin with. Edge Of Tommorrow had the problem of no one outside of Japan being familiar with the original work so it didn't matter. Alita from what I've heard doesn't even take place in Japan anyway.
Yeah remind me of how often black and hispanic actors play roles of characters that are of another ethnicity as opposed to white actors playing roles of characters that are of other ethnicity a problem that's been around since the earliest days of filmmaking in the U.S. when it wasn't too uncommon to have white people play native Americans and Asians oh the blackface thing when they weren't too interested in using actual black people.
You do know that China has a well known reputation for producing propaganda right? There's also "no to be fair's" allowed considering what said propaganda involves.
Don't know where you've been but Native American Representation in modern films is much better than it was for much of the early 20th century (though as the Lone Ranger showed Hollywood can't help themselves).
No one in DragonBall outside of characters like Roshi & Chaiotzu are asian. |
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Southkaio
Posts: 343 |
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I hope this very ambitious Akira movie project is still alive.
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BadNewsBlues
Posts: 5913 |
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Spielberg's been on iffy track record the last decade. |
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Commander Cluck
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I can tell you one movie which wasn't made for China: Crazy Rich Asians. That film did not have global appeal at all unless we're defining "global" appeal as strictly American in this case. It did 174 million domestic and only 64 million international. Only 2 million of that was from China. Chinese commentators were calling it a whitewashed Asian American experience, not representative of actual Chinese culture or values. Even Dragonball Evolution did better in China. |
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Crispy45
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I don't see how an Asian-led film doing decently disproves that Asian roles being recast in films never get as much attention or outrage as others do. If anything it should prove that you don't need to racebend for success and that means people should get even more angry when it happens. Although looking at it's Wikipedia page, it seems like there was some controversy in casting for that as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crazy_Rich_Asians_(film)#Casting_criticism Apparently even Crazy Rich Asians was "whitewashed" to some degree.
Any of your garden variety websites. Verge, Salon, Vox, Variety, Polygon, Time, and others love to bash on her.
In the sense that most actors are expected to roll over and take the abuse in today's culture. Her speaking out and saying she can play 'whatever character she wants' is certainly going to draw some heat onto her, no doubt. But regardless, the articles on her predate any of her recent comments.
Doesn't that just prove how little people care about anime adaption casting choices and the limited amount of outrage they can generate?
A topic that deserves it's own thread due to how large and encompassing it is. The idea that only an X actor or an X writer can play or write for an X character is becoming a lot more common in American media. And that makes me wonder when that'll affect anime dubs, which are nothing more than mostly white people playing Japanese characters.
While I'm sure there was some outcry, mainly among us anime fans to which I was one of, it wasn't nearly as much as ScarJo nor in the mainstream. Just Google Nat Wolff Death Note and compare the first page of results to Googling Scarlett Johansson Ghost in the Shell. I only saw one article from a website called Indiewire mentioning Nat Wolff whitewashing a character, the rest were generic PR articles, advertisements, sequel rumors, and interviews. ScarJo's results was hit piece after hit piece after hit piece accusing her of whitewashing a character. Detective Pikachu technically "blackwashed" the lead role, since the Tim Goodman in the game is not black.
In the early days of filmmaking. But we're talking about 2019. There's no way a studio could ever get away with pulling a Boris Karloff as Dr. Fu Manchu today unless maybe it was satire like Robert Downy Jr in Tropic Thunder but even that got people upset. |
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anddo
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https://comicbook.com/anime/2018/01/10/dragonball-evolution-akira-toriyama-dragon-ball-super/ |
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BadNewsBlues
Posts: 5913 |
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No I mean as I mentioned most media outlets don't make a big deal about because they don't care about such things nor understand the outrage over them which is fine (for the most part). But when you have an obnoxiously vocal fandom who bristle at anything regarding an adaptation of their favorite work? It's kind of hard to say little to no one cares.
Except Tim's ethnicity is of no importance to his character. And the only people who think blackwashing is a thing are people trying to give some misguided parity to whitewashing which is far more prevalent and problematic issue.
Even then nearly had a white actor playing a japanese character in the recent Hellboy movie so even then Holllywood can't move completely away from it's past.
Made even sillier by the fact that some of the characters in the movie call out his character's faux blackness. |
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