Ghost In The Shell (2017) First Trailer

[Mighty Attack Tribble]

The original cast of the anime will perform the Japanese dub.

screencrush.com/ghost-in-the-shell-voice-actors/

[y4j1981]

Everything Wrong with 'Ghost In The Shell' 1995

[4real]

Got a cinema card in February and every film I've seen since getting it (8 by the way) has had this trailer before it. They are really really trying to push this hard here in the U.K. I have no interest in it at all.

[Jiren]

While I'm not as big a fan of the Anime as some (I've seen the first film, That's it) I still like it and for the "New One" lets just say I'm cautiously optimistic

Reviews so far have been very mixed.

[A Platypus Rave is Correct]

By the way...

SPOILER: Click to show

{Spoiler}{Spoiler}

Apr 14, 2016 10:54:28 GMT -5 A Platypus Rave is Correct said:

Apr 14, 2016 10:51:22 GMT -5 El Cokehead del Knife Fight said:

And it would be one thing if like the English dub gave her a more western name but her name is Makoto Kusanagi which makes her explicity Japanese. I don't look at Johansson and think "yeah, she'd make a great Japanese woman"

Considering the source material that could be written as a plot point in the movie. Since the main point is that ISN'T really her body.

I f***ING CALLED IT!

They apparently did it really half assed and stupid... but I called the twist a year ago and that's all that matters.

thank you.

[Deleted]

Just got back from the theaters. Even as someone who was really, really skeptical about this, I found I enjoyed it, despite basically being a dumbed-down version of the original film.

SPOILER: Click to show

{Spoiler}It's really faithful to the original in a lot of ways - both major stuff like the spider-tank and the flooded alley fight scene, and smaller moments like the Major going deep sea diving to clear her mind. Whether intentionally or not ScarJo channels a lot of Mimi Woods' dub performance, though Batou is sadly rather forgettable. The main difference is that lot of the more heavy philosophical content has been replaced by much more "Western-friendly" stuff (at the risk of sounding stereotypically otaku). The Puppet Master and his whole post-human dilemma is replaced by Kuze, who's one "I never asked for this!" away from being a Deus Ex protagonist, despite Michael Pitt trying his best. Other additions like an obviously evil tech company CEO and the Major's tragic backstory don't fare much better. It feels like the script was written by someone who obviously loved the source material, but had to comply with Hollywood script doctors, as the differences are pretty much uniformly to the film's detriment.

Despite that, though, I actually enjoyed myself. I'd never watch it over the original film but I didn't feel like I wasted an hour and a half either.

["Trickster Dogg" James Jesse]

As someone with only superficial knowledge of the property, be it as a manga or anime, I saw this today and thought it was alright. Sure, narratively it was a bit pat, and the dialogue was rather clunky, but the design aesthetic of the film was on point and the broader takes on post-humanism, gender and racial identity, selfhood, cybernetics, phenomenology, and remediation were interesting, even if they don't have easy answers. I understand complaints about casting and representation in this movie, sympathizing with many of them, but they don't really work as complaints within the logic of the movie itself or those broader social, philosophical themes to which the movie alludes.

Regardless, here's a great, albeit dated, article that deals with all of the social and historical ramifications of thinking about the topic of representation of/within Japanese culture.

www.theverge.com/2016/5/9/11612530/ghost-in-the-shell-anime-asian-representation-hollywood

Ghost in the Shell and anime's troubled history with representation

A controversial casting is exposing the many complications and contradictions of Japanese animation

In January of 2015, it was announced that Scarlett Johansson would star as Major Motoko Kusanagi in Paramount's live-action adaptation of the beloved anime and manga franchise Ghost in the Shell. The reaction at the time was mild to positive — mostly because it seemed to make a lot of sense if we're just talking about Johansson's career. The actress starred in a slew of sci-fi roles that allowed her to delve deep into the relationship between a woman and her body and her consciousness: she was an AI turned omnipotent being in Her, a lonely alien turned carnivorous sexpot in Under The Skin, and a drug mule turned omnipotent being in Lucy. Her career was an IRL thinkpiece, and assuming the role of a cyborg supercop seemed like the next logical step.

As usual, it took a picture for the outcry to start. This month, over a year after the casting announcement, Paramount Pictures released a still of Johansson in costume as Kusanagi, and the internet did not take it well. The image of a famous white actress in Kusanagi's signature black bob seemed like another depressing example of Asian actors being removed from Asian narratives — the insult of M. Night Shyamalan's Avatar adaptation and Emma Stone playing a half-Chinese character in Aloha were still fresh in our collective memory. (Both films were bombs; so much for the "white actors are more bankable" argument.) Add the more recent controversy of Tilda Swinton's casting as a Tibetan character in Marvel's Dr. Strange and there was enough fuel for a fresh round of writers, filmmakers, and actors taking Hollywood to task for its refusal to cast Asian actors.

Whitewashing is very real, and the deficit of starring roles for Asians is one lane in the representation race that is stubbornly slow to advance. But in the case of Kusanagi, an anime character, it's not as simple as Japanese or white. The issue of representation feels cozily easy to understand here in the US — you either are or aren't represented — compared to the long history of self-erasure in post-war Japanese narratives. It's a dense, depressing history, and by the end of it I probably will still come to the conclusion that casting Johansson was the wrong move. But perhaps — and this is just a guess — the Ghost in the Shell adaptation shouldn't have been an American production in the first place.

After World War II — after two nuclear bombs and the forced demilitarization, an impoverished and war-torn Japan desperately needed to rebuild its economy, and it turned to toys. Using one of the only resources it found itself with a surplus of — discarded food tins from the occupying allied troops — Japanese manufacturers began making cheap tin models of American Jeeps. They became immensely popular among Japanese children whose families couldn't afford expensive toys, and their popularity spread to the states, starting with returning GIs bringing home gifts for their kids.

Why American Jeeps? Why immortalize the vehicles of the country that defeated them? Well, they certainly wouldn't be making Japanese vehicles — there was no more army to speak of, any remnant of Japan's recent past as a military bully was being erased with embarrassment and shame. At any rate, this is where Japan gets into the business of selling the look of America back to it, and even doing it one better. After the toy cars started taking off, plastic figurines and dolls also rose in popularity, and Japan's expertise in the kind of disarming cuteness we know today really began to get honed. The toys had to be adorable enough (or flattering enough to American post-war jingoism) that American children would covet them — pre-war exports of traditional Japanese dolls with straight black hair and narrow eyes had never seen much movement overseas. Toymakers saw the popularity of Disney-style Western cartoons and started iterating on them, gradually making the heads bigger, the eyes rounder, the features softer. For many years, one of the most common dolls in Japan were unlicensed plastic reproductions of Kewpie, a wide-eyed Caucasian baby with origins in a 1920s American comic.

Kewpie was so vigorously appropriated that he eventually became a de facto Japanese character — when I see Kewpie now, I think of mayo. But this was an early chapter in a long tradition of the Japanese face and physicality being erased from contemporary Japanese iconography. Prior to the war, human figures in Japanese fine and commercial art were allowed to look Japanese, just as they had in centuries of block prints. After the war, once the Japanese face had become synonymous in the western imagination with untrustworthiness and cruelty, toymakers, character empires like Sanrio — and, ultimately, artists — adopted a more benign countenance. Osamu Tezuka, who is credited with the creation of the "anime eye," was directly influenced by Walt Disney and Max Fleischer, and responded in kind with his manga series Astro Boy, the tale of a sweet doe-eyed robot boy who's been rejected by his creator. The 1963 animated series was the first anime to be translated and distributed overseas, and key to Japan's literal soft-power comeback.

This is not a story of a country so in love with Magic America that it abandoned its own cultural identity — this is a country that culturally appropriated from the culture that had asserted dominance over it in order to rebuild itself.

During the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, when Japan had not only made its comeback but was experiencing an unprecedented economic bubble (on the back of consumer electronics exports — toys to the rescue again) Japanese animation started to really come into its own as an art form. And as it shifted from its origins as a medium aimed at children to explore more adult themes, it turned its gaze toward the ground zero of this aggressive expansion. Tokusatsu (special effects) films like the Godzilla franchise had explicitly riffed on post-atomic anxiety, but anime melded that anxiety with the technoparanoia and existential musings of American science fiction authors like William Gibson and Neal Stephenson. The ubiquitous image of the atom bomb is the inciting or concluding event; the fallout is technology. Innocent youths are caged in robot suits, powerful psychics are trapped in decrepit childlike forms. Technology alienates everyone: consciousness becomes unmoored, bodies become arbitrary and disposable, sex becomes less a biological function than a psychological dysfunction, the planet and its host of forgotten nature spirits cries out in agony.

As anime began to pick at the scab left by two deep American wounds, the role race plays in that conflict is often obfuscated by the medium itself.

Enter Ghost in the Shell. Masamune Shirow's cyberpunk crime saga was first published as a manga serial in 1989, and by the time it was released as a feature-length film in 1995 the bubble economy had burst. The emphasis of the story shifted from the paranoid thrill of a world where everything is connected via a network to the fate of a human consciousness in a world overtaken by technology. Its heroine, Major Motoko Kusanagi, is a cyborg with a manufactured body and a human brain (maybe). She, like many other enhanced humans in this vision of 2029 Japan regularly jacks into a globe-spanning network via ports in the back of her neck. She's already started to wonder about the origin and location of her consciousness, when an artificial intelligence, that has self-generated in the network, finds her and asks to merge with her as a means of mutual self-prolonging. The 1995 film ends with her merging with the entity and assuming a new, younger body.

Motoko is part of a security force largely made up of artificial bodies. Her second-in-command, Batou, looks like an anime Dolph Lundgren; huge and muscular with slicked-back blonde hair. Motoko herself is tall and broad-shouldered, with brilliant blue eyes. The security company intercepts an empty runaway prosthesis that looks like a Scandinavian beauty queen. I don't think it's an accident that the cyborgs of Ghost in the Shell, including Motoko, are more "anime-looking" than the characters who are mere Japanese or American humans. This is not to say that they are supposed to be white, but they are not explicitly Japanese, either. They're a supposed sign of progress in a blindly technologized future, where not only can an individual's race be augmented away; one's entire physical being can be.

As comic author Jon Tsuei pointed out on Twitter, Japan has a relationship to technology that is fundamentally different from the states, which is why GitS is so irrevocably Japanese. Technology was what Japan turned to as a means to assert itself as a world leader when military might was no longer an option. The wire-encrusted dystopias of ‘90s anime are the natural outgrowth of a country brought to its knees by nuclear warfare that threw itself into a tech explosion and is now slumping through economic downturn. And it's an indirect American inheritance. America took away Japan's army, tossed it some tin cans, said "Here, play with this, instead." A half a century later, we have the PS4, Hatsune Miku, and sex robots. That's better than comfort women, to be sure. It's definitely better than nukes. But it permanently altered the entire question of national identity.

When I went back to investigate some of the responses to the photo of Johansson, I came upon a video, above, published by a Japanese vlogger named Yuta. In it, he asks young Japanese adults on the street what they think of the casting, and what they make of the outcry over whitewashing in the States. "My biggest challenge of this interview was to explain what whitewashing [is], because it's not something Japanese people usually think about," he says in the introduction.

The reactions are depressing, but if you've been following up to now, fully predictable. "I think this is better than hiring a Japanese actress," says one woman enthusiastically. "Yeah, it will look more anime-ish if the actors aren't Japanese." Every interviewee seems genuinely flummoxed as to why American audiences would be opposed to the casting. "Maybe they have high standards," one young man guesses.

Japanese audiences, unlike American audiences, don't understand Motoko to be a Japanese character, just because she speaks Japanese and has a Japanese name. This speaks to the racial mystery zone that so much anime exists in, allowing viewers to ignore such unpleasant dynamics as oppression and discrimination even as they enjoy stories that are often direct responses to those dynamics.

Of course, it's a different issue for Japanese Americans, who grew up forced to think about identity in a much more tactile way. For us, anime is something from our country, or our parents' country, that was cool enough for white kids to get into just as fervently. We couldn't see ourselves in Hollywood's shows and movies, but we could claim anime as our own, and see ourselves in its wild sci-fi imaginings and cathartic transformation sequences. Of course, I use the words "see ourselves" loosely.

I was born in Japan, but raised by my Caucasian mother in America. She had an appreciation for Japanese art and culture, and raised me on some very basic Japanese. But I remember her looking askance at anime, especially as it started to rise in popularity in the states in the early ‘90s. "Those big eyes? That crazy hair? They don't look Japanese at all!" (Of course, the average anime character does look unmistakably Japanese, but in the same way a rococo painting in a gilded frame looks unmistakably French.) I knew I was supposed to be suspicious of anime, but as I grew into adolescence I found myself almost involuntarily drawn toward it. Not only did it have the seductive qualities of the forbidden, the lurid, the trashy — it was also one of the only pop cultural connections I had to a culture I had largely been severed from at birth.

I don't know that I saw myself in most anime characters, though it certainly didn't hurt that they tended to feature far more female protagonists than Stateside entertainments. I found myself strangely attuned to the rhythms and sensibilities of everything from Sailor Moon to Serial Experiments Lain to Evangelion. But I never had to visually deal with the fact that these magical girls and teen soldiers and melancholy robots were Japanese — culturally, yes; racially, no. It was enough for me to hear Japanese being spoken and Japanese culture being referenced to. But Japanese people — flesh-and-blood humans — had long since been removed from one of Japan's chief cultural exports.

If I saw myself in anyone, though, it was in cyborg creations like Motoko — a mishmash of parts, not belonging to one culture or another, freakishly tall and unsure of the origin of her emotions. When I think about who I'd like to see in that role, it's not Scarlett Johansson, but it's not Rinko Kikuchi, either (who, despite what we've been led to believe, is not the only Japanese actress who can speak English.) Maybe I don't imagine anyone as Motoko other than myself; maybe I'm not alone in that feeling.

Ghost in the Shell is the product of and response to decades of physical erasure and technological alienation. It's pop cultural fallout, a delicately layered croissant of appropriation upon appropriation. It's as timely as ever, but it feels wildly inappropriate for an American studio and the British director of Snow White and the Huntsman to pick it up and sell it back to us. At the same time, Japan and the US have been stealing and selling images to each other for decades, and the result hasn't always been awful. I would still argue, though, that the knotty history that leads to Motoko Kusanagi will be lost in translation. This isn't The Matrix or Pacific Rim, this isn't just a look and a vibe being lifted. This is the entire history of Japan's relationship with itself, the US and technology, and without that, you're left with nothing but an empty prosthesis.

[Deleted]

Well, it's a flop in the US at only $20MM opening weekend.
Worldwide it got another $40MM.

It has yet to open in Japan & China, but who knows if that'll make up the difference.

I'm kinda surprised. I know the internet buzz hurt it, but that usually doesn't hurt the box office - especially for really generic type stuff like what this appeared to be.

[Wolf Hawkfield no1 NZ poster]

I saw the movie last night and it was aright at best. Not terrible but it was obvious that it hS dumbed down for a mass audience and Michael Pitt was just too much of a mopey bastard to be a good villain.

That being said I really wish people would stop moaning about Scarlett Johansson being casted as the major as nobody in Japan gave a flying f*** about it and Mamoru Oshii was fine with it.

Yes it would be nice if a Asian actress got the role but it wouldn't of made the movie any better.

[Fundertaker]

Apr 4, 2017 22:07:17 GMT -5 Wolf Hawkfield no1 NZ poster said:

That being said I really wish people would stop moaning about Scarlett Johansson being casted as the major as nobody in Japan gave a flying f*** about it and Mamoru Oshii was fine with it.

Yes it would be nice if a Asian actress got the role but it wouldn't of made the movie any better.

And, again, in the original context, the Major is of unknown origin and is in a cyborg body anyway, so who cares.

[Wolf Hawkfield no1 NZ poster]

Apr 5, 2017 3:41:34 GMT -5 Fundertaker said:

Apr 4, 2017 22:07:17 GMT -5 Wolf Hawkfield no1 NZ poster said:

That being said I really wish people would stop moaning about Scarlett Johansson being casted as the major as nobody in Japan gave a flying f*** about it and Mamoru Oshii was fine with it.

Yes it would be nice if a Asian actress got the role but it wouldn't of made the movie any better.

And, again, in the original context, the Major is of unknown origin and is in a cyborg body anyway, so who cares.

Try telling that to the social justice types that are still outraged.

[Koda, Master Crunchyroller]

Riiiiight, well I was going to give my two cents on the film but after this last string of posts, I probably shouldn't. >_>

[Fundertaker]

Apr 5, 2017 5:25:37 GMT -5 Wolf Hawkfield no1 NZ poster said:

Apr 5, 2017 3:41:34 GMT -5 Fundertaker said:

And, again, in the original context, the Major is of unknown origin and is in a cyborg body anyway, so who cares.

Try telling that to the social justice types that are still outraged.

I try to not care about educating people on this kind of subjects when they're mostly just obnoxious about what they believe.

[Mozenrath]

I find it kinda funny that Japan is making Fullmetal Alchemist with an all Japanese cast. You know, the story of the blonde Elrics. In fantasy Germany. Whiter cast than a CW drama.

Like, I get that the Japanese film industry doesn't exactly have a ton of white actors good for parts hanging around, and even if they did, Japanese directors are... questionable at times in getting a good performance in English. It's still kinda funny.

[FinalGwen]

At the end of the day, even if Motoko is a cyborg, we all know that's not the reason they cast Johannsen. Light Yagami isn't a cyborg, but Death Note is going ahead with Light Turner.

They keep on saying "but if we don't cast popular white actors our movies are gonna flop!", but then you've got Avatar The Last Airbender, Gods of Egypt, Exodus, The Lone Ranger, so many movies where the whitewashing was the main thing known about it, and they all flopped. And now this is flopping. So what's their excuse?

And yeah, there aren't going to be as many protests from Japan. Because there, Japanese actors and actresses can get prominent work.

[Deleted]

Apr 5, 2017 6:55:17 GMT -5 FinalGwen said:

At the end of the day, even if Motoko is a cyborg, we all know that's not the reason they cast Johannsen. Light Yagami isn't a cyborg, but Death Note is going ahead with Light Turner.

They keep on saying "but if we don't cast popular white actors our movies are gonna flop!", but then you've got Avatar The Last Airbender, Gods of Egypt, Exodus, The Lone Ranger, so many movies where the whitewashing was the main thing known about it, and they all flopped. And now this is flopping. So what's their excuse?

Yeah. The whole, "But they couldn't cast a non-white actor!!!" argument was DOA for me anyway, but this recent string of white-washed flops should be proof enough that's a lame argument.

It's always funny how people argue, "Well the Major was just a cyborg body...so of course she's gonna be white!" Ok. She doesn't HAVE to be Japanese, but that doesn't mean she CAN'T be any other ethnicity than white. Again - just an illogical argument all the way around. If people are being honest with themselves how can they really argue that because she's a cyborg body that it makes sense that you'd cast a white person? Are all cyborg's Caucasian? haha, makes zero sense to me.

Everything I've read about the film makes it seem like a very good looking shell with no ghost. So there's some poetic irony there.

["Trickster Dogg" James Jesse]

Apr 5, 2017 6:55:17 GMT -5 FinalGwen said:

At the end of the day, even if Motoko is a cyborg, we all know that's not the reason they cast Johannsen. Light Yagami isn't a cyborg, but Death Note is going ahead with Light Turner.

They keep on saying "but if we don't cast popular white actors our movies are gonna flop!", but then you've got Avatar The Last Airbender, Gods of Egypt, Exodus, The Lone Ranger, so many movies where the whitewashing was the main thing known about it, and they all flopped. And now this is flopping. So what's their excuse?

And yeah, there aren't going to be as many protests from Japan. Because there, Japanese actors and actresses can get prominent work.

As much as those movies failed, financially speaking, I don't know how much of that is because of the lack of racial diversity of casts and the stars who are central to the advertising. Gods of Egypt and Exodus are 'swords and sandals' movies and The Lone Ranger is a western. Those are two genres that aren't as popular or successful as they have been decades prior. Avatar: The Last Airbender was a film written and directed by a filmmaker who was already being pilloried in the news after sub-par movies like Signs, The Village, The Lady in the Water, and The Happening. While film studios have no excuse when movies fail when there are controversies over representation of race and culture, especially when they cast white actors as the leads, I would also caution against treating the subsequent refusal to pay to go see these movies because of the lack of racial and cultural diversity as *the* cause, when the political economy answer, that certain genres aren't popular and economically viable and certain creative types, like writers or directors, behind the scenes are no longer the proven box-office draws they once were.

And I think this cuts both ways. I've heard explanations about why The Fast and the Furious movies and Star Wars: Rogue One were successful because of the ways in which women and people of colour are the central foci of these movies (as opposed to another white man). Again, in many respects I think this is true, but I also wouldn't say that racial diversity and gender parity are the causal factors of success, especially when both franchises are exactly that--another part of the overall standardized Hollywood format that tries to capitalize on past successes in the form of prequels, sequels, and legacyquels.

Even then, I find myself agreeing with film critic Ignatiy Vishnevetsky when he says that Scarlett Johanssen is perfectly cast in Ghost in the Shell. However, I read such a claim not in terms of Johanssen's star power as a box-office draw, but against some of her recent choices in roles, like Lucy, Under the Skin, and Her, of which Ghost in the Shell is another piece. These movies show the ways in which bodies, minds, and subjectivities (or senses of 'self') are often not in sync with one another. This is also reinforced by the ways in which the body, the mind, and the sense of self are gendered in these movies, given the visibility of Johanssen as a successful woman within the Hollywood star system (in Her, Johanssen is all but disembodied with the exception of the autoaffection of her voice; in Under the Skin, Johanssen does her first nude scene; in Lucy, Johanssen plays up her action heroine bona fides in such a way that recalls her performance of the Black Widow in the Marvel movies).

Ghost in the Shell is a film that I took as the collapse all of these meta-textual renderings of Johanssen's past roles. The movie is about the anxieties of the body versus the mind (as if such a dualism is natural or necessary), about gender and race, about nationality and economy, and so on. The very problematics people have with the movie are its very themes. Now, maybe the film could have said more about them, or taken a firmer stand on some of them, absolutely, especially in way that are sensitive to the criticisms that have been levied against it. But I wouldn't dismiss them outright as 'problematic', even when the film, as a vehicle for telling a story, is kind of flat. Instead, as a cultural-aesthetic object of 2017, I think the film engages with ideas for which there aren't easy or obvious answers. Then again, I'm also bringing different baggage to my interpretation of the film. I'm not familiar with the manga or the anime per se, but I've familiar with post-modern theory, I know about philosophies of technology, I've read Donna Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto. But I also recognize that there is a complex social, political, and economic history, post-World War II, of race, technology, and gender in Japan, that the link I posted above addresses, that can't be reduced by my encounter with the film either.

[Deleted]

Apr 5, 2017 12:51:51 GMT -5 "Trickster Dogg" James Jesse said:

Apr 5, 2017 6:55:17 GMT -5 FinalGwen said:

At the end of the day, even if Motoko is a cyborg, we all know that's not the reason they cast Johannsen. Light Yagami isn't a cyborg, but Death Note is going ahead with Light Turner.

They keep on saying "but if we don't cast popular white actors our movies are gonna flop!", but then you've got Avatar The Last Airbender, Gods of Egypt, Exodus, The Lone Ranger, so many movies where the whitewashing was the main thing known about it, and they all flopped. And now this is flopping. So what's their excuse?

And yeah, there aren't going to be as many protests from Japan. Because there, Japanese actors and actresses can get prominent work.

As much as those movies failed, financially speaking, I don't know how much of that is because of the lack of racial diversity of casts and the stars who are central to the advertising. Gods of Egypt and Exodus are 'swords and sandals' movies and The Lone Ranger is a western. Those are two genres that aren't as popular or successful as they have been decades prior. Avatar: The Last Airbender was a film written and directed by a filmmaker who was already being pilloried in the news after sub-par movies like Signs, The Village, The Lady in the Water, and The Happening. While film studios have no excuse when movies fail when there are controversies over representation of race and culture, especially when they cast white actors as the leads, I would also caution against treating the subsequent refusal to pay to go see these movies because of the lack of racial and cultural diversity as *the* cause, when the political economy answer, that certain genres aren't popular and economically viable and certain creative types, like writers or directors, behind the scenes are no longer the proven box-office draws they once were.

The issue isn't whether or not the white-washing was the ONLY cause of a flop necessarily, just that the "justification" of "Studios HAVE to cast white actors because that's a better way to ensure box office success" is being proven untrue. It's not even about "diversity" per se, but just about NOT changing a character's race to white for the supposed specific purpose of high returns.

It is a combination of many, many factors (most of which studios can't even really predict - a director that had a hit with one movie could have a flop the next - it's all a pixie dust really) that determines overall success of a film, but the out-dated aforementioned claim is quickly being proven problematic at best. For a long time the idea of "white actors = bigger box office returns" has been the defacto argument against casting monitories/whitewashing.

[Feargus McReddit]

Apr 5, 2017 6:55:17 GMT -5 FinalGwen said:

At the end of the day, even if Motoko is a cyborg, we all know that's not the reason they cast Johannsen. Light Yagami isn't a cyborg, but Death Note is going ahead with Light Turner.

They keep on saying "but if we don't cast popular white actors our movies are gonna flop!", but then you've got Avatar The Last Airbender, Gods of Egypt, Exodus, The Lone Ranger, so many movies where the whitewashing was the main thing known about it, and they all flopped. And now this is flopping. So what's their excuse?

And yeah, there aren't going to be as many protests from Japan. Because there, Japanese actors and actresses can get prominent work.

Yeah, I REALLY don't understand the casting on Death Note especially with the implications that potentially come from casting a white male in that role. It felt like a lazy default when it's not like Asian people DON'T go to American schools.

Also, yes, there's no definitive survey based proof that diversity improves box office. On the flip side, some of the highest grossing films of the last couple of years were lead by prominent (Hidden Figures) or unknown (Moonlight/Get Out) black actors and they out grossed the movies listed above combined. It can't be a coincidence.

It just feels like common sense to me. Make movies that reflect the wider world without making it a massive thing in casting. Even if you could argue Get Out and Hidden Figures didn't do the latter, Moonlight had a stronger connection to a hell of a lot more people than Ghost in the Shell did.

[YAKMAN is ICHIBAN]

I think the main reasons it didn't do well are that 1) it isn't as widely beloved an IP as a lot of people might think and 2) it looked like the type of role that Scarlett Johannsen plays in her sleep.