Hollywood Keeps Making Whitewashed Movies Despite The Fact They Keep Bombing

Hollywood has valued whiteness over what audiences want and they’re paying the price

I shouldn’t be this naive. But I really thought we handled this two years ago.

Ridley Scott’s Exodus: Gods and Kings movie was widely lambasted for its casting of incredibly white white people to play ancient Egyptians in a retelling of the story of Moses. In response to the backlash, Scott said that his perfectly liberal hands were tied and the only way he could fund the movie would be to cast white superstars:

“I can’t mount a film of this budget, where I have to rely on tax rebates in Spain, and say that my lead actor is Mohammad so-and-so from such-and-such. I’m just not going to get it financed. So the question doesn’t even come up.”

That excuse has always been the rallying cry for whitewashing in Hollywood. Movies can’t make money without white stars. But the Exodus movie crumbled under the weight of its own whitewashing. The flick grossed only $65 million domestically and $250 million worldwide, which means it was unable to recoup its $140 million budget and additional money spent on the marketing. In short, the movie bombed. And it really had no reason to fail, besides the melanin-deficient cast. A Bible epic. Released over the Christmas holiday. Directed by Ridley Scott. Starring Christian Bale. It had the recipe for success and the only reason for its failure was a national and global audience that was fed up with the whitewashing.

So after Exodus’ failure, I thought we would be done with it all. I thought Hollywood would learn its lesson and move on from whitewashing movies. Because, really, Hollywood is quick to pull the plug on trends that hurt bottom lines. But that didn’t happen.

After Exodus, we got February 2016’s Gods of Egypt — a movie depicting remarkably white Jamie Lannister and fantastically white Legolas as ancient Egyptians — which became one of the year’s biggest flops, opening with a $14 million weekend on a $140 million budget. This spring we got The Great Wall, a movie about the Great Wall of China, starring notoriously white Matt Damon as the protagonist, saving a horde of Chinese people from monsters. The movie was a domestic dud and its overseas box office drawing was far below expectations, too.

And now there’s Ghost In The Shell.

The live-action remake of a classic Anime movie stars unimpeachably white Scarlett Johansson playing the Japanese hero. The movie even used some convoluted storytelling to explain how the main character turned white. Seriously. And as a result, a movie based on a film with a cult following, featuring a proven moneymaker in ScarJo, is having a disastrous showing in theaters.

Finally, we have an executive admitting that whitewashing played a role in a movie’s demise. Kyle Davies, domestic distribution chief at Ghost in the Shell’s Paramount Pictures said,

“I think the conversation regarding casting impacted the reviews…You’ve got a movie that is very important to the fanboys since it’s based on a Japanese anime movie. So you’re always trying to thread that needle between honoring the source material and make a movie for a mass audience. That’s challenging, but clearly the reviews didn’t help.”

Now, all of these movies also have one thing in common: they suck, and they each received bad reviews leading up to their releases. And while it’s easy to say “these are bad movies, so they perform poorly,” it’s hard to separate the shittiness of a movie from the inauthentic and convoluted storytelling gymnastics it takes to insert white characters into stories where they don’t belong. In short, the low quality of these movies are indelibly linked to the choice to whitewash the characters.

Yet with all of the evidence that whitewashed movies underperform — evidence that has been apparent for at least the two years since — Hollywood is persistent in its perpetuation of white narratives.* It’s as if Hollywood is either reluctant to admit whitewashing is to blame for its failures or is so willing to preserve the image of dominant whiteness that a certain level of losses doesn’t matter. This has been the case for years — but especially after The Great Wall and Ghost in the Shell — any whitewashing in movies is an act in elevating whiteness at the expense of cutting a profit.

So until Hollywood is willing to adjust to the fact that whitewashed movies are destined to fail, it’ll just have to accept these losses and wonder what’s the point of white saviors if nobody comes out to see them.

*We can talk about this another time: but it’s interesting to juxtapose Hollywood’s insistence on whitewashing in the face of poor box office performance with, say, Marvel comics’ quickness in blaming poor sales on “diversity” and willingness to abandon that initiative after only a few months of poor performance. But, like I said, that’s for another time.

David Dennis, Jr. is a writer and editor based out of Atlanta (but it’s still WHO DAT all day). He’s an adjunct professor at Morehouse College. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Smoking Section, Playboy, CNN Money, The Source, Complex.com, ESPN’s The Undefeated and wherever people argue about things on the Internet. He’s a New Orleans Press Club award recipient and has been cited in Best Music Writing. He’s also a proud alum of Davidson College.

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