(05-24-2023, 11:42 AM)NYC4jags Wrote:

(05-24-2023, 11:12 AM)NewJagsCity Wrote: I am with you on some of this.  I'm not bent over fictional characters changing race / color in movie remakes. And if the race of a historical character is ambiguous, then a fresh racial take is sometimes interesting. If nothing else, it opens up discussion on who these people were and what their places in history were.  But if it's clearly obvious historically (ala Hamilton), then it's just nonsense, IMHO.  That being said, I do look forward to someday seeing a biopic of David Duke played by Denzel Washington or MLK played by Richard B Spencer.  Or even Julius Caesar played by Don Cheadle.  Because the way the Roman Empire absorbed conquered peoples, there had to have been a black Caesar at some point in their history.  They just couldn't find any black marble to immortalize them.

Yes, it can definitely be taken too far. 

The Hamilton thing being a broadway musical written with the intent of blending multi cultural modern music with historical figures makes it an extreme outlier.

But we can certainly point to plenty examples of just plain old "bad casting" or someone taking an intent to include every race imaginable and empowering the women in the story to an extreme  - that they actually hurt the story.

Hamilton just works.  It doesn't need to be explained and it may never be duplicated.  But because of the Hamilton example, we should withhold judgement on these cross race casting decisions until we know more about the specific production as a whole.  

So sure, go ahead and cast Adele James as Cleopatra.  But market it as a "modern retake" on the story or something like that.  Don't market it as "the true version" of the story.

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(05-24-2023, 08:41 PM)p_rushing Wrote: The issue I have is just write a new story with new characters. If you want to have characters of different races, fine, but don't just switch the race on existing characters and expect anyone to believe they were the best choice for the role.

Create a new story and let it exist on its own, unless you Lucas and you ruin the series because the new stories aren't great.

That's the biggest problem, all the woke writers are terrible and can't write any original hits.

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Star Wars sequels say you're right.
But Into the Spiderverse and EEAAO say you're wrong.

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