Blue_Popo posted... I'm not even Asian, but is anything not starring a white dude pandering? Iron Man, Cap, Thor were all B-listers, Guardians even lower than that. Shang chi is in that level of B/C lister
Some of you really want an Avengers movie starring Iron Man, Cap, Thor, Hawkeye, Spiderman, Star Lord, Winter Soldier, Loki (multiple variants minus black one), Dr Strange
Eh it's more like Disney in general has this motive to appear woke so a lot of their movie choices seem more artificial. Black Panther was a great movie though. They can be pandery and good at the same time.
I'd argue that film representation does have some value, but film studios really try to oversell this to make themselves look progressive.
Many people have a very hard time understanding criticism of "woke" ideology as being different from a progressive ideology. Woke generally refers to a much more performative (dare I say virtue signal) set of actions while progressive is more matter of fact.
Frankly, I don't care what the leads of a film look like, but Feige has made it very clear that the MCU will be making very strong pushes for spanersity going forward. If these films are like Black Panther then great. If they're like Captain Marvel and Falcon and the Winter Soldier (by far the most I've ever been disappointed in an MCU film/series) then I won't be too excited.
In a greater sense, I'm getting really sick of the Marvel formula and Marvel humor. It looks like they're trying to make their movies more spanerse, but not trying to fix any of these issues.
The Suicide Squad is a great example of doing something different with the super hero genre. MCU stuff tends to feel the same even when it is different. The MCU also seems to rely on a lot of callbacks to obscure side characters showing up.
Like I would probably never accuse a DCEU film of pandering if they had a film full of non white leads, because they've never given any indication that they care about performative politics so I'd assume it was 100% because they believe in what the film is.
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just tell them all your base doesn't belong to us because we were getting stoned...they'll understand-Ken156