It’s hard to miss the controversy surrounding Hollywood’s racial diversity crisis right now. After #OscarsSoWhite – a hashtag cooked up in reaction to the fact that only white actors had been nominated at the Academy Awards for the second year in a row – the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has vowed to clean up its act and diversify.
It’s about time, especially as Hollywood in some cases appears to be regressing rather than moving forward. There have been recent individual examples of Hollywood getting it wrong – hey, is that Rooney Mara playing a Native American? – that have particularly stick in the craw, but there have also been the cast-wide examples of political in-correctness that can only suitably be described as ‘whitewashing.’
To ‘celebrate’ the release of Gods of Egypt, Alex Proyas’ fantasy epic that reimagines a state in Northern Africa as populated almost entirely by white people, here are eight recent cases of Hollywood completely whitewashing a movie.