It’s been a turbulent few years on the cinematic superhero front where race is concerned — a year before Disney-owned Marvel’s 2018 Black Panther rewrote the book on non-caucasian superheroes with a record $1.3 billion global take and a Best Picture Oscar nomination as a cherry on top, arch-rival DC — a subsidiary of rival studio Warner Bros. — was busy bungling its introduction of Cyborg in Justice League. No one quite knew how badly it was all bungled, however, until actor Ray Fisher — the stage-trained Shakespearean actor hired by Zack Snyder to incarnate the popular comic book figure — unleashed on replacement director Joss Whedon on Twitter for “abusive behavior” in summer of 2020.
That bold violation of Hollywood protocol subsequently led to an avalanche of accusations against Whedon, many going back decades, as well as some internal executive shuffling at Warner Bros. and a whole lot of damage control to rebut the idea that anything akin to “racism” was involved.
More than a year later, the dust is still swirling, but Warner Bros. has made great efforts to both push back and make amends, releasing Zack Snyder’s Justice League in an effort to repair the rift with Fisher (unsuccessfully, as of this writing) as well as announcing a new take on Superman in which the Man of Steel is expected to be depicted by a black actor.
But are these efforts sincere? Perhaps more importantly, do they represent progress for non-white performers and artists, or is it simply another way of putting minority artists in a different kind of box?
In our first Godcast, Wade Major and Tim Cogshell welcome television star Sherman Augustus of Into the Badlands and the forthcoming Stranger Things 4 for a candid, far-reaching conversation about Hollywood diversity, creative freedom and what it takes to make a truly great superhero (hint: humanity).
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