Colorblind Casting (and Comics)

Here's a fun project by a fan of actor John Cho, mapping him into some major movie posters to show that there's really no artistic need in the vast majority of cases to cast leading male movie roles with white guys.

http://www.slashfilm.com/john-cho-movie-posters/

I'll focus, from the geeky aspect, on the Avengers: Age of Ultron poster. This is one of the few missteps, as, of all the Avengers, Cap is one of the few who probably should be a white character, given the origin story and the realities of the era; it would be difficult to tweak the origin enough to narratively justify an Asian (or black) actor in the role and still have it, effectively, be Captain America. The same is true of Thor (Idris Elba notwithstanding). Black Widow is so heavily identified with the Russian (Soviet) background, that it would be tough to change her ethnicity as well, though I suppose you could conceive of a Chinese ballet/assassin character.

But when you look at the other Avengers in the film, there's nothing compelling about race/ethnicity about them. Why couldn't Tony Stark be Asian? Why can't Hulk be Asian?[1] Why could Hawkeye be Hispanic? Why couldn't Nick Fury be black? (Oh, wait …). The Maximoff siblings are traditionally from Eastern Europe, but there's little that forces them to be; they could be from Tanzania rather than Transia.

Arguably, there's little here that forces a particular gender, as far as that goes. Iron Man could be Iron Woman (being a drunken egomaniacal genius with poor impulse control doesn't seem gender-specific). All the rest — again, arguably, excepting Cap and Thor — could be women.

(The same could be done, again for argument, with most of the existing ethnically diverse characters — there's nothing intrinsically African-American about War Machine or Falcon, though the point of this mental exercise is to increase diversity, not decrease it. Skipping forward a film, Black Panther, though, probably needs to stay as he is, since his African origins are an intrinsic part of who he is.)

Comics have a bit of a challenge, as do their movies, as most of these characters were created 50-75 years ago, and so reflect the ethnic and gender diversity of the creators and publishers and perceived audiences of that era. And because we're talking, in comic books, about a visual medium and characters who have been published looking as they do for many, many decades, there's a strong inertia against changing ethnicity and gender for fear of changing the characters themselves.

The challenge, then, is to consider — not necessarily act, but consider — where these characters could be portrayed looking different without actually becoming different characters and losing part of what it is you're trying to create on film (those characters).

(The question of whether one should do this is a bit different.[2] IMO, I think it's legit to seek more representation / relatability for a more diverse audience from both civic and pragmatic/commercial standpoints. Not only do you involve a greater part of the population with characters that look like them, you arguably draw in more of that diverse population to buy movie tickets to earn you money.)

Anyway, that was a long and probably overly-heavy read over what is just one of several fun posters in an exercise about how, no, the universe doesn't implode if you have an Asian James Bond or rom-com lead or etc. Which seems pretty straightforward to me, but maybe that's why I'm not a Hollywood casting director.

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[1] Actually, the Hulk in the comics at the moment is Asian. So there. Although he's actually a different person, and thus a different Hulk, which is not quite what I'm arguing, which is that there's nothing in the classic story of Bruce Banner and the beast within that requires Bruce to be white, from either a character or narrative perspective.

[2] And the comment section of the article immediately degenerates into nasty arguments about "SJWs" and "cultural appropriation," so stray there at your own risk.

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