If I remember right the reason he was cast was that he had a good relationship with the director and they wanted to work together.

And it certainly made me more interested in the movie - One of the major themes of the Fantastic Four is family and familial structures, and talking about how adoption changes and affects those familial structures seemed an interesting change that still fit within the basic themes of the Fantastic Four as a whole.

But then the reviews came in and I never saw the movie. *shrug*


"Slowly, eventually introducing"... is basically what they did, right? She was a major supporting character in the last Iron Man series, and then got promoted to the lead of one of the two current Iron Man series.


Well, that seems a little simplistic t' me.

The reasons are two-fold:

1) So that Marvel doesn't look like they are stuck in the early sixties despite the fact that the majority of currently-published titles star characters more than 40 years old.

and

2) $$$$$$$ (The return of Superman.)

Let's hit these one at a time.

First of all - The reason they create a new characters is to broaden their stable so they have another character to stick on lunchboxes and underoos. (Remember, most of Marvel's money comes from licensing.)  

HOWEVER... they have trouble selling new characters.

Runaways gets cancelled despite being one of the best books of the decade, while people keep buying Spider-Man.

Mainstream comics fans are not (I hypothesize with no evidence) particularly open to new ideas... AND creators are not fired up to give their best ideas to Marvel, instead of Image where their potential profits are much, much higher.

Still, if Marvel keeps publishing the same lily white roster of (at least) 25 year old characters, they are going to seem anachronistic and out of touch. So they switch "The Hulk" up and hope they can stealth launch a new character off the residual popularity of a 50 year old character. This will hopefully be  more successful than launching a new character for fans to ignore.

And, maybe, the new character can gain enough of a fan-base that they can put the new character AND THE OLD character on underoos. That is twice the underoo money! (Which, again, is way more than the comic money.)

And seem like they are part of the 21st century to boot!

(B) It's not like the Hulk has been setting the world on fire, recently, sales-wise. Recent series from major creators have pretty much flopped.

So they take the original Bruce Banner Hulk off the board for a bit, and then relaunch him.

It's the Death of Superman. DC kills Superman for a while and lets him be dead, and then EVERYONE wants to read Superman when he comes back.

Keep publishing the Hulk and fans get bored. Take the Hulk away for a year or so and then publish an 8 dollar "RETURN OF THE HULK!" special with a lenticular cover, and fans think of this as a big deal and come back. They want what they can't have.

Letting a character lay fallow for a while can work very well - The J Michael Straczynski THOR relaunch was a pretty huge hit (Till Marvel screwed it up with terrible crossovers) and that was because they retired the Thor property for a while. Cancelling Wonder Woman back in the '80s certainly helped the popularity of the re-worked Perez version a huge hit. Letting characters rest or replacing them with new versions are two of the very few things that can revive interest.  

Just to review:

(A) Original doesn't sell, and

(B) Creators don't want to let Marvel make all the money on their best, original ideas. This goes back to Roy Thomas in the '70s, at least. (Note how many of Roy's characters, such as the Vision, were simply slight variants on Golden Age characters?)

I AGREE THIS IS STUPID! I HOPE I AM WRONG ABOUT (A)!! But it is my best interpretation of the data.



I guess I'm generally for it. If Marvel isn't going to launch a bunch of new, original books, than even slight variation on comics I've read hundreds of issues of are welcome.

Sue and her adopted brother are more interesting to me than another story about Sue and her brother -  I've already read at least 300 issues of Fantastic Four!  I know how that plays out!  

It's really a matter of the squeaky wheel getting the grease. African-Americans are more organized at lobbying for diversity in casting than other minority groups. The result is that Hollywood feels a lot of pressure to recast white characters as black, but not much pressure regarding Latino or Asian casting. I saw a study of the demographics of speaking roles in TV or movies recently which confirmed my hunch that black actors are actually currently over-represented in casting relative to the African-American proportion of the U.S. population. Latinos in the U.S. actually outnumbered African-Americans, but Latino representation on the screen is relatively low. Despite this, whenever the ethnicity of a white character is changed, the character almost always becomes black rather than Latino or Asian (e.g., Heimdall, Nick Fury, Valkyrie, Iris West, Ben Urich, etc.), though there are some exceptions (Ned Leeds & Flash Thompson in Spider-Man: Homecoming and Elektra).

As you note, the only cases in comic movies/TV in which casting seems to change minority characters to white characters is when they are originally Asian (the Ancient One, making the Hand multi-ethnic rather than almost completely Japanese). Even when Asians are cast, there seems to be a disproportionate number of actors/actress who are Asian/white mixed race rather than just Asian (Linda Park, Colleen Wing, Elektra, etc.). I don't include Mantis, because the original character is mixed race. I don't if that's just some strange sociological phenomenon is which the Asian acting pool is disproportionately mixed race or if TPTB have some strange aversion to casting people with Asian faces.

Yep.