Did Whitewashing Cause 'Ghost in the Shell' Flop?

Kyle Davies, Paramount’s president of domestic distribution, places a lot of the blame on the whitewashing controversy surrounding the casting of Scarlett Johansson as protagonist Major Motoko Kusanagi, a Japanese woman who’s placed into a “perfect” powerful cybernetic body that resembles that of a white Westerner.

“We had hopes for better results domestically,” Davies told CBC News. “I think the conversation regarding casting impacted the reviews. You’ve got a movie that is very important to the fanboys since it’s based on a Japanese anime movie. So you’re always trying to thread that needle between honoring the source material and make a movie for a mass audience. That’s challenging, but clearly the reviews didn’t help.”

But while “Ghost in the Shell” received some withering criticism from the Media Action Network for Asian Americans, Deadline suggested an array of other possible reasons for the film’s poor performance, including the high cost of securing the rights to the original manga, a lack of executive oversight and mixed reviews that painted the film as “cold, boring, thoughtless, and the same old same old next to … ‘The Matrix’ and ‘Blade Runner.'”

Read the rest of this article at CBR.com.