Dude Where’s My Diversity?

A couple of recent movies have bugged me and I didn’t realize why UNTIL NOW (dramatic music). Seeing the trailer for The Forbidden Kingdom was a fanboy’s dream. Jackie Chan and Jet Li together? 1990s me is ecstatic! However, 2000s me is irritated that even though there are two martial arts acting heavyweights in the film, the main character is the white kid from Sky High. Is America SO xenophobic that we can’t watch a movie unless we see someone obviously American as the protagonist? Was Hollywood worried that Cletus and his family wouldn’t go see Kingdom because “it has too many of those Japaninos in it”? Another example of this is the movie 21. It is supposedly “based on the true story” of some MIT students who count cards in Las Vegas. However, the main MIT student in the story is Asian and of course the main actor in the movie is a white guy.

I realize I am not stating something that is a new trend. This has been going on since the dawn of motion pictures. It just seems to me that Hollywood thinks Americans are so self centered (maybe most are, I don’t know) that we only want to watch people on screen that look like ourselves. Without doing any research I’m going to try to think of a movie where the main character isn’t a white or black guy. First I’ll look at action movies. Going back to Jet Li or Jackie Chan if you look at their foreign movies, those are the best. In movies that they have made in America they are paired up with Jason Statham, Chris Tucker or Owen Wilson. You might bring up Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon but that wasn’t an American film and even when it came to the U.S. it was marketed to the art house crowd. I guess The Rock would be an example of a non white or black action star. But I suppose he already won over the average joes with his wrestling career.

I guess I don’t really know who to blame on the lack of diversity in cinema. Is Hollywood underestimating the public during the casting process? Or is the general public really this prejudice (either consciously or subconsciously) and Hollywood is just responding to popular opinion?