 This may come as a shock to none of you, but Hollywood has a very bad track record when it comes to diversity in films and representation. Oftentimes having a good old fashioned white dude play a black gentleman or a white woman play an Asian girl. It's not good, it's a bad situation. Hollywood also has a worse history at course correction by not trying to necessarily improve their tactics but instead take it in the extreme opposite direction. And today that's exactly what I'm gonna be talking about, where we're at today as far as representation goes and how far we've come in the last 50, 60, 70 years. Let's begin. Before I really dive into this, I first wanna say listen, I have fun here, this is a very casual show. I did some research, I Googled and I highly recommend you do the same if you actually care about this stuff in any serious sort of way. It's right in front of you, typically a computer or a phone and you can just say like, what are the stats of movies representing women or gay people or anything, it's at your fingertips for the most part. This video is gonna be my opinion based on things that I've looked up and what I see with my own eyes and what I perceive to be going on in Hollywood as an outsider, as someone that just makes videos in his free time on YouTube. Okay, so with that out of the way, go ahead and hit the subscribe button, hit the notification bell so we can have fun on this channel, talking movies all the time every single week and I would appreciate it if you join me. And if you really like what I'm doing by the way, there's a super thanks button somewhere down under the video, you can hit that and say, hey Adam, I love this video, do more of this. Here's a few bucks, keep being true to yourself and true to the community. With that out of the way, let's get into this. I started this out by saying Hollywood doesn't have a great track record when it comes to representation on film, this isn't a secret, this is something that the current people working in the industry very well know and that's why they've changed things a lot, especially after the Me Too movement years ago, they've been getting more females behind roles, they've been getting more females behind the camera, more black led films, Asian films, everything under the sun, every color of the rainbow is present now. To be clear, I've never felt alienated, I don't see movie trailers coming out like the black and mean and go, oh my God, where am I gonna find a movie that's catered to me? There's always one, every single week there's a movie with a white dude killing someone or cracking jokes or in a drama film. There's plenty of, I guess, I don't even know if I would say representation because I don't really have a culture or a religion or anything that I need to get behind, I just like good stories and good films and that can be a problem when a lot of these studios today are kind of prioritizing or checking boxes saying like, all right, do we have a gay person in this movie? Do we have this in the movie? But when it started out, it was pretty much just a box with white male in it. Right in the 40s and 50s. And speaking of John Wayne, he actually at one point in time played an Asian fella in a movie. Who was he playing again? A smaller known individual, oh yeah, Genghis Khan and Raza Ghul, an Arab, played by Liam Neeson in the Christopher Nolan movies. That's like, I'm okay with that because it's a different interpretation. It's different version of the character. However, the fact that there's so little Arab representation in both the comic book series and on the big screen, little bit of a head scratcher why they didn't just go with an Arab actor. But I understand they need a big name for the villain role Liam Neeson pulls in numbers. Whatever, I still think they probably went to lost anything had they gone with an Arab in the role. It's Batman. People are gonna go out and see the film regardless. Look at the Prince of Persia based on the popular video game franchise. Who do they get to star in their movie? Well, of course, one of the most famous Arabian actors working today, Jake Gyllenhaal. What? They grabbed like the whitest dude they could find for this role. And it's not like Jake Gyllen. Jake Gyllen, that was great. I love him. I would say he was like a mega star when that movie came out. It's not like they couldn't have found someone maybe. I don't know. I just, it was bonkers when I heard that. I was a lot younger then. I still even scratched my head thinking, really Jake Gyllenhaal is the Prince of Persia? Come on. Come on, people. Scarlett Johansson was the butt of many jokes as she took on a lot of roles that seemed to be more skewed to cultures that weren't white at the time. I remember she was in Ghost in the Shell as the main protagonist. Just not a great look when you have a pale ass white chick playing someone that's typically of Asian descent or from an Asian background. Marlon Brando, RIP, over the years had played both a Mexican gentleman and an Asian character. So very diverse range he's got there. What's more wild to me in Borderline and Salting is when they have white actors play real people from history. You have Jennifer Connelly in A Beautiful Mind playing a Latina woman. In the movie 21, the film is based on a real life MIT card counter from Asia. The movie? White dude. In 1944's Dragon Seed, Catherine Hepburn plays a woman named Jade. Jade, who lives in a quaint Chinese village. Unless we forget 2013's Little Diddy, Johnny Depp playing Tonto, a Native American. What? I brought this up in a more recent video, but one of the biggest head scratchers was when Indian-American director, M. Night Shyamalan made a live action avatar the last airbender film and he cast all the characters of Asian and Indian descent as straight up white kids. And then the villains were all Indian descent who were supposed to be white. The list and the examples go on and on and on. We have decades of films to go back and look at and see who they picked and why. And for the most part it was just they're a star, we'll put them in this role. It doesn't really matter if it's culturally insensitive or it doesn't make a lick of sense based on how they look and how they act and how they speak, but we gotta get butts in the seat and that's what it's all about. You see what was going on back then is Hollywood was scared that if it wasn't white people in front of the camera people wouldn't buy tickets to see it. They were the draw. I actually saw a study that came out that really went into depth of all of this and it took a date range from 2007 to 2014 the 700 most popular big films that came out between that time period and it was 24 female directors. The rest of them were male. That's a wild number, but wait, that may be a conversation for another time. We're focused on race here, race swapping, things of that nature, but it all kind of plays the same part. Where Hollywood's looking at the numbers and they're not impressed with what's been coming out they're also seeing that movies are starting to become less popular overall. People aren't going to the theaters as much. They want to come up with ways and ideas to generate interest and get people into theaters. And so they think, all right, let's put more diversity in the cast. Let's focus on this storyline with this type of culture. Let's go into the LGBTQ stuff and we'll really get everybody pulled in. But in fact, it kind of works the opposite often. I'm of several different minds on all of this stuff. At the end of the day it's mainly right person for the right role sort of thing but there's no denying that in the 30s and 40s and so on, there was a culture of white identity that had to be portrayed on the screen. Those were the movie stars. Those were the people you'd come out to see. Of course, there's exceptions. There always is, but for the overall most part it was pretty much white male lead doing most the talking. Woman was kind of the damsel in distress, the pretty looking thing. What's fast forward to today? All these streaming services are available. There's a rise in movies being made, tons of exclusives going out the door to all these different services and we're seeing more diversity. We're seeing more representation on screen. In fact, I think every single day there's a Netflix movie starring a gay character or LGBTQ character of some sorts, a trans, lesbian. It doesn't matter. There's a lot of representation. Arguably too much because if you look at a stat at least in America, about 7% are openly gay, trans, lesbian, non-binary. Of course there's gonna be people that don't admit that so you could probably pump that number up to 10%. Hell, you could double it if you want but it does feel like at this point it's an overwhelming amount of representation just for the sake of it being there and not to drive the story forward. You can have these characters without having to make a big stink about it, right? In fact, it really doesn't matter. For the most part, if a character is gay or straight it doesn't even need to be known but what it feels like is straight up pandering. You might see two boys sitting next to each other at a dining room table with other people and they will go out of their way to say this is John and his boyfriend, Jack and then they will have literally nothing else to do the rest of the film. It was just there to tip the hat and say we hear you, we see you, we're with you and it's pointless. Well, I shouldn't say it's pointless. The point is to get that out on social media. It's to rile up those people to say hey, come see our movie, we got you. You're in here, the representation is great. And then you rile up the other people that are like no, we don't want this crap in our films. How dare you? And then you have the people, I'd say more like me that are like, all right, why? This is okay, cool, good for you. Way to be. Do these characters bring something to the story? Is there more to this? Or are we just pandering for the sake of pandering? Yep, that's what I thought. Check your box, move on with your day. And that's often how I feel Cast has been going too. Little mermaid, she's black now. Why does it change the story? Does it add something? No, she's just black now. So that's something you have to deal with. Look at how many kids now are seeing her in a new light. They can see themselves on the screen. A little black girl now has someone she can look up to and say, that's Ariel. I love this. And that's great. And I really think it would be sad if you argued with her and said that's not Ariel at the end of the day. It puts you in a really awkward position because who gives a shit, right? It's a fake character. The story's been told. It can be told a million different ways. Where it gets tricky though, where it gets a little bit dicey as when Disney puts her in the film that everybody grew up with. And we see her as the redheaded white Ariel. And everything else about the film is pretty much the same. So it's like, oh, there's Flounder, there's Sebastian, there's Triton. They're all singing the same songs we grew up with or even doing the same exact camera shots. So why'd you change Ariel's skin color? Is the story somehow changing? Is this a different Ariel? Well, no, we already established it's the same one. Okay, so then what was the point of that other than making it awkward? Because it's awkward at the end of the day. That's all it really is. It's not like, I don't find it. I mean, I kind of find it insulting just because I think they did it to check a box and say like, hey, but then I also feel bad for thinking that and I feel bad for Halle Bailey because I think she's freaking dropped a gorgeous and a talented actress and she deserves better than having to play Ariel and have all this crap thrown at her. Give her her own damn story. Give her her own film. Call her the little mermaid but make it a different storyline. Give us different, they added a couple songs but it's packaged in the same freaking movie told as a remake of the classic. I think an example of doing it right is Nick Fury from The Avengers, an established white character from the comics played by Samuel L. Jackson in the film. The movies are their own thing. They're their own universe. They're not supposed to be a live action remake of a cartoon or a very popular thing. It's based on a comic book and sure they'll use some of the same stories but this isn't like page for page in Nick Fury film. He's just a new version of this character and comic books have the luxury of having multiple versions of characters throughout the years. So it's really the packaging of this whole thing. And to that point, I think it's important for a lot of different reasons but mainly so kids have someone that they can look at and say, hey, that person kind of looks like me. I can see myself as this character, that's powerful. Especially if it's a hero, if it's someone fighting for good and kicking ass and they're not just the token black dude in the film that dies in the past in horror films. It's played, it's a joke over the years and it's gotten better. But that's kind of how it was. South Park has a character named token. They certainly address and acknowledge that it's a thing that used to happen. You have the main cast and then the one black dude or woman that's just kind of there saying, oh hell no and throwing out little lame catch phrases. For the longest time, whenever there's a majority black film, it's about slavery. It's about oppression, it's about depression. It's always like a sad thing. It's never a celebration. It's never something kick ass. Until Black Panther came along, kind of changed that. Of course there's been other examples prior but typically not like big, mostly black cast of characters. And so Black Panther, you see that you go, okay, this is just a superhero movie and this was kind of a smarter movie. It had layer to the conversation. It wasn't just some stock boilerplate thing. There was some depth to the movie and I appreciate that. But it was just refreshing to see a cast of characters not being whipped or beaten or in slavery and in chains and bondage. It was just a good flick. For the most part, I don't think Black Panther's amazing but I thought it was fine. I thought it was a solid movie. Of course there are movies that have featured black superheroes before Blade, Spawn, Meteor Man, Blank Man. But for the most part, it's primarily white folks kicking ass. Some people today look at Hollywood and they say they hate white men, we're being replaced. And I just, I really don't see that at all every week. There's still a ton of movies that have white actors in them. I am very sure there are people in Hollywood working at different studios that do hate white dudes. That's fair. Sometimes I do, that's okay. I hate my, I mean to be fair, I hate myself a lot of the time but it's really nothing to do with my skin color. It's just, you know, it's who I am. White men are still making up a vast majority of flicks. Tom Cruise isn't getting replaced. There's still a lot of Chris's in the MCU. Thor 15 is coming out. I'm sure Chris Evans will find his way back as Captain America at some point. We have a Ryan Reynolds, Hugh Jackman, Deadpool, Wolverine movie coming out. There's plenty there. Do I think Hollywood's overcompensating? In some ways, yeah, absolutely. I do think also though, they're making some good moves. Peele is knocking it out of the fucking park with his movies. I love Nope. I love Get Out. I like the brilliance behind those films, the layer to them. I think that Tyler Perry opening up a studio is really awesome. Although I heard recently he's backing off some of that because of AI and he's gonna use that to do backgrounds and shit, which is bullshit but whatever. It's his studio and his money I guess at the end of the day as much as I hate that. I think the big problem comes in for the most part and this really isn't that hard. I think most people can agree. When Disney and these other studios take a beloved property and they do a race swap just for the sake of it. Or they kind of push a main character to the background and focus on someone else that has no real bearing to the franchise as a whole. White actors have taken a lot of roles from different races over the years. That's not a controversial statement. That's just a fact. But that doesn't mean we correct that by doing the opposite. There needs to be more subtlety about it. When it comes to comic books, superhero shit, based on a book, based on something that's more vague, do whatever you want. I think the sky is the limit. But when you are taking someone that's been established and then doing a race swap it just seems like it's just for the sake of doing it. To again, check that box to tip the hat to a different group of people in a different section of Twitter or whatever you're doing. And it's just insulting I think to everyone regardless of if those people even see that at the time. It's insulting. Because it's almost never for the sake of the character or the story. It's just for them to feel good about themselves for making that call or to pull in people, get likes on their socials, get their message out there, do whatever the hell they're trying to accomplish at the end of the day. People have different reasons for it. I just want good movies being made. And I think a lot of you feel the same way. Well, there you have it. Absolutely scorching take on Hollywood casting. Really, I'm kind of like, yeah, some of this is absolutely necessary and makes sense. And other times I'm like, yeah, that's just straight up so you can feel good or you can reach out to a certain group. That's spoiler, not going to your movie at the end of the day anyways and it just comes off as stupid. Let me know your thoughts though. Are you more angry than I am about it? Or maybe you're kind of like me and you thought, yeah, I mean, whatever. Just make a good fucking movie. I don't care about the color of the skin. It's all kind of meaningless at the end of the day anyways for the most part. Let me know, leave a comment. Please like the video if you liked the video. Super thanks, become a member, Patreon, YouTube join. There's ways, there's ways to jump in. And I would appreciate if you showed up again in the future. So have a good day and hopefully I see you next time.