Sepko said:
ninjaRiv said:
Luke Cage, Black Panther, White Tiger, Blade, John Stewart. Two of those are thanks to Ultimate Spider-man who have finally put ethnic characters on a screen without having to change a character's ethnicity altogether. I agree that lots of black characters are not well known enough for a movie but I don't see how that works as an excuse at all. Blade was never that well known yet he got a movie. Also "well known outside of comic geekdom" is a stupid thing to say (not calling you stupid, just the thing you said. You bring up a valid point). Iron man wasn't that well known to the "outside world" and neither was, as mentioned, Blade. or Nick Fury, Jonah Hex, Constantine.
From a movie business standpoint you're going to have to go with brand recognition, Blade was a serious risk that paid off because it was about a black guy chopping vampires with swords, who didn't want to see that? Iron Man had a cartoon series that I used to love to watch, so there was some exposure there. Nick Fury doesn't have his own movie yet (unless we're counting the Hoff one), Jonah Hex flopped and Constantine just barely survived but won't be getting a sequel. The thing with not-well-known properties is that, unless those black superhero characters have some sort of incredibly and easily sellable gimmick/actor/director, it's going to be tough, which is something not a lot of studios like to count on.
ninjaRiv said:
Explain to me how making Johnny black would not send the message that it's better to be lazy and just change an ethnicity, than to work on a black character. Don't you think that sends an odd message? Really?
I wouldn't call it lazy, admittedly it probably takes a little bit less creativity to just update a character than to make a completely new one. But like I said before, new characters aren't going to sell as well.
Well, yeah but what about the Ultimate Spider-man example? White Tiger, power Man and Nova (who I forgot to mention) are surely great examples of a place to start brining these characters into the light. Now Power Man has more fans who would pay to see the movie that's always rumoured. This, I think, is the better way to go about brining ethnic characters tot he big screen. Same with Static Shock, actually. That was huge and for good reason. If this comic book movie obsession Hollywood has right now was about back then, a Static Shock movie would exist, I think.
Yeah, they didn't do so well in the box office but that's not stopping Hollywood and TV execs from trying other properties. Chew, for example (although, it's a no go), pretty sure Saga has been optioned for a film (a book with a black protagonist, actually) Sixth Gun (I've never even read that) Runaways and more have been optioned are on the way. Plus, Constantine is coming back in the Justice Leage Dark movie, as the main character. Providing it gets done.
I'd actually like to retract my "You can be white, too" statement as I think that was generalising too much. But I still think it's a bad message to send out to anyone, that characters that people love can just be changed for no reason. Yeah, I know Fury was changed but I think that's different. I could explain why I think it's different but I suck at explaining things and would come off as stupid. I'll try anyway: The Ultimate Universe is totally different from the regular one (or it used to be) as everybody knows. Fury was intentionally based on Sammy L J (possibly due to Millar's tendency to base his stories on "what if" ideas. "What if Batman was bad, what if superheroes were real, what if Fury was black" etc). So, marketing agreed that this, plus Sammy L J's almost legendary status with movie fans, would be a great idea (actually, I wonder if Millar was intentionally trying to get the attention of movie people).
