Ghost in the Shell is "international" story

[Callate]

Ghostbusters.

*hysterical laughter*

...The comparison did occur to me as well, yes...

 

[briankoontz]

http://nextshark.com/fan-bingbing-highest-paid-actress-instagram/

While Asia is a huge market and there are various Asian capital centers that produce movies with their own highly paid actors, Hollywood has *it's own* highly paid actors. Scarlett Johansson is part of the Hollywood system, not the Bollywood system or the Japanese, Chinese, or Korean systems.

Don't think of it in terms of the right creative choice for the material - think of it in terms of capital loyalty and identity. WHO is Scarlett Johannson going to make money for? If a Japanese actress is pulled in to do a Hollywood film, not only does this make money for different people than she's typically aligned to, but she is then marketed to a different audience (US) than she's typically marketed to (Asia).

People on this website and generally rarely consider a core component of the reality of movie-making - what might be called the "business" side of it, instead focusing on the creative side. If we were to step back and think about movie-making in it's entirety, the business side makes up the majority of the total reality, so it's hardly surprising that Hollywood capital seeking to maximize profit for itself sticks with "it's own" actors.

 

[MatParker116]

I'm usually someone who feels that when you adapt a story, you can change parts of it- Jurassic Park the movie has a different theme and WILDLY DIFFERENT characters than the book (Alan Grant loves kids, Ian Malcom is a 50 year old bald white man, Hammond was a sociopath). But when it's an adaptation of a story from Japan, that tends to bother me a bit more that it usually gets white washed. Especially sad that two prominent Asian actresses said they would have done it- Ming Na Wen and Constance Wu, the latter one being a perfect idea because while she's a largely comedic actress, Chris Pratt was a largely comedic and look how his career shifted recently...

This is a case, as a sub-sub-sub-sub average writer of fiction, I haven't got the confidence to share anything I write yet, where an audience surrogate or Ishmael or Rashamon-style story would have served the plot better. They could have kept the cast of Ghost in the Shell completely Japanese, but had Scar Jo be around as a transferred detective or overseeing Internal Affairs, that way they could have had their cake (bankable white person to sell to xenophobic Americans) and ate it too (remained a largely Japanese production).

But after being highly reticent of the new Ghostbusters movie going in, and loving it when I saw it, I will reserve judgement for now.

Casting a Taiwanese or Chinese actress would cause problems for the film in Asia, huge no-no to cast one asian nationality as another, not to mention the business side of things.