As a result, casting East Asian actors as supporting characters comes off as a bid for good optics and an attempt to appease critics without actually telling diverse stories.Īction cinema should be fertile common ground for American studios, since the genre is an indelible part of the East Asian film industry, both regionally and as a cultural export. That Hollywood still minimizes the Asian roles and performers that do exist-while trying to profit off their limited presence-seems to reflect the industry’s deep-seated resistance to change. Practically speaking, doing so should be a relatively easy feat, considering the vast pool of stories, aesthetic styles, and cinematic talent the region offers both behind and in front of the camera. But characters such as Katana obscure the fact that if Hollywood is so eager to expand its box-office appeal in East Asian countries, it could start with writing characters and casting actors of East Asian descent in more leading action roles. With the Chinese box office projected to surpass North America’s by the end of 2017, more tentpole franchises are featuring Asian faces, locales, and storylines. Money is, ironically, also a reason why many big-budget films are casting East Asian actors in the first place. (This, of course, ignores the massive international box-office numbers of action franchises with diverse casts like the Fast and Furious series and Star Wars VII: The Force Awakens.) In response to criticism of whitewashing, producers, screenwriters, and directors regularly defend their choices as smart business moves meant to give their films global appeal. (Though instances are still rife in Hollywood, with Tilda Swinton’s casting in November’s Doctor Strange, Emma Stone in Aloha, and Scarlett Johansson in the upcoming remake of the anime Ghost in the Shell.) Meanwhile, not a single lead or co-lead in the top 100 highest-grossing domestic films last year was Asian, according to USC’s 2016 report on representation in Hollywood. Having performers of Asian descent play Asian characters in blockbuster films is certainly an improvement over straight-out whitewashing-where Caucasian performers play historically nonwhite parts. Helen Cho (Claudia Kim) in The Avengers: Age of Ultron Mercy Graves (Tao Okamoto) in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice Su Yueming (Bingbing Li) in Transformers: Age of Extinction and many others. In the last 5 years, there’s been Elektra (Élodie Yung) in Netflix’s series Daredevil Kato (Jay Chou) in The Green Hornet several characters in the X-Men films Sulu (John Cho) in the newest Star Trek movie Dr. The action genre, and especially franchises, is rife with examples. Others in Suicide Squad also suffered from a lack of screen time, but Katana represents the norm for Hollywood’s East Asian characters, who are almost exclusively sidekicks or underwritten rivals. Except for a soupçon of lines delivered in terse Japanese, she’s a ripple in the background. But in the film itself, Katana isn’t actually a member of the titular group: She’s the almost entirely wordless accomplice to Joel Kinnaman’s Rick Flag, who’s in charge of keeping the villains in line. Dressed in a Rising Sun mask and wielding her namesake weapon, she appeared in promos featuring images of Hokusai’s Great Wave and whooshing sword sounds. Falling into the latter category was the superheroine Katana, played by the newcomer Karen Fukuhara. Ahead of the release of the DC Comics film Suicide Squad, potential viewers were bombarded with ads featuring comic-book names both familiar (Harley Quinn, the Joker) and unfamiliar (El Diablo, Enchantress).
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