Jeez. I guess I'm going to have to respond to this.
StarLord and Ant-Man are played by actors who specialise in comedy. The same for Thor- Hemsworth tried playing it serious in the first two Thor movies, but he's more fun as an actor when he's playing to his comedic strengths. If 30-something Daniel Day-Lewis had been cast in the same role with the same script he'd have given a completely different performance. The snippets of Eric Stolz's performance as Marty McFly are a really good example of the difference casting makes.
Yep, that's certainly one thing that could mess things up that I have concern about. Another is the writing. You can absolutely write a character like a dope or have them do things out of character. Michael J Fox's Marty McFly and Daniel Day-Lewis(one of the greatest actors of all time) are not the greatest analogies. Gambit is a preexisting character with a ton of personality, lore, and fans already built in. Writing can absolutely make or break a character. And as Gambit fans I think we can all agree, Gambit requires some decent writing to do him justice. Like I said before, Chris Pratt and Paul Rudd kind of punched up their characters to make them fun. Gambit doesn't need that.
I don't think anyone wants him played like Kramer from Seinfeld.
Well, I guess we can all agree on that.
My point had a bit more nuance to it than that I believe.
Having an equal amount of female characters to male characters is not being progressive. It's reflecting reality. You can pick out flops like Charlie's Angels or Terminator Dark Fate as examples of wokeness inevitably sinking movies, but every Terminator movie since 1992 has sucked and underperformed at the box office compared to the franchise's name recognition and the blame for 3 & 4 didn't focus on too many men and robots. Those movies sucking is a lot more to do with incompetence at the senior executive level across the film industry (see:Wild Wild West and the guy at Fox who just didn't like the look of Galactus).
Nobody(reasonable) has a problem with inclusivity and just generally having all different types of people in movies. It's when the people making the movie make their ideology the priority over good characters, story, and plot. Everyone loses when that's the case.
Charlie's Angels was a movie that was marketed to women but they got hung up on portraying the leads as tough, smart, and strong women taking on evil men to the point that they forgot to make them interesting and likeable. The movie bombed. Then the director took shots at men for not going to see it. Fun fact, more women went to see Rambo Last Blood in the theaters then saw Charlie's Angels.
The other sequels that came out after T2 and before Dark Fate are completely irrelevant here. Dark Fate was completely washing those away and directly following T2. Which general consensus has as one of the greatest action/sci fi films of all time. Seems like there is a lot of exciting things you could do there. Linda Hamilton was back who everyone loves as Sarah Connor. The first thing the movie does is kill 12 year old John Connor(the most important character in Terminator lore) right after the events of T2 making that movie pointless, just so they can introduce a female savior of the world. And that's exactly why they did it. Don't believe me just go look up interviews with Tim Miller and articles that came out about it at the time. They introduce a female good guy Terminator(kinda) so they can have an all female group. There were so many ideas you could go with following T2 that include Sarah and John Connor along with Arnold but because they had to make it "diverse" they had to dream up brand new characters and essentially just try to create the same movie. It flopped. Imagine if the first tease of Dark Fate was an image of Linda Hamilton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Edward Furlong. The hype would've been next level.
Ghostbusters(2016) is barely worth mentioning. People never wanted a reboot and because the first trailer looked like garbage and everyone thought so, it became this weird rallying cry for women and feminism that everyone got in on from the cast, to the director, to the media who all got together to call all the fans "sexist", "man-babies", "basement dwelling losers" etc. It even got to the point where they insulted fans directly in the film multiple times. Media outlets and Twitter were all banding together to try make this film a success. All for this complete piece of trash film.
Star Wars. Kathleen Kennedy's goal from day one was to have the main hero to be a female and more females in the Star Wars universe in general. She wanted the main character to have innate goodness, ability, and powers. Again, you can look this up it's tru. The problem is, audiences whether female or male like their characters to have some type of journey and grow. It's why Luke Skywalker is so beloved. On to him. Because, Kennedy was so interested placing her ideology into Star Wars she didn't develop an over-arching plan for the trilogy. She just hired Rian Johnson for Last Jedi because she liked his ideas ideologically and let him do whatever he wanted. What resulted was the complete fracturing of Star Wars. Finns story was ignored for the introduction of Rose Tico. Poe learns the important lesson to always follow orders and never ask questions. Especially if the authority is female. And the complete deconstruction of one of the most recognizable and beloved heroes in film history, Luke Skywalker. Luke is a miserable, cranky, loser who has given up on his family and friends and just wants to die. He refuses to help Rey and is bested by her physically. And then he dies, really before he makes up for anything he has done.
The deconstruction of male characters leads into Star Trek Picard. This is what we do now. Deconstruct beloved male characters to make way for someone else. Not only is Picard berated by people about how he has failed or whatever. But the show brings in social topics from current times into the show that are completely out of place in the Star Trek universe. But the show wants it's woke points. The Star Trek shows are completely tanking because of this. Star Trek fans must be so bummed out.
Hell, even in Bill and Ted Face The Music, Bill and Ted are failures and it's not until they figure out it's their daughters who are responsible for the song and thus saving the universe.
These are just some examples. There's plenty more in movies, shows, comic books and video games. I don't think I'm saying anything outlandish here when I say there are content creators letting their personal views negatively affect their content. Even if their heart is in the right place, they wind up creating poor content and get defensive when people don't like it. It's the "woke" idea that's ruining these things because it's the main focus and I think a lot of people have a skewed idea of what it even is.
Birds of Prey is actually an enjoyable enough film, but whoever decided to release it under that title rather than 'Harley Quinn (and the Birds of Prey') is an idiot. 'Birds of Prey' has no name recognition. Most movie goers are low information and go by the poster and the title.
I actually hated this movie. It was a chore to sit through. It was basically their attempt at a female deadpool. But it was just a cheap imitation. It was ugly to look at. It wasn't funny. It also had a terrible promotional strategy. Name was terrible but it specifically promoted for a female audience. That was a big part of promotion. As it turned out it flopped and 80% of the audience that turned up for it was male. Some of these studios think they can rely on the female audiences for these comic book/action flicks and that audience just isn't there. And it was rated R so little girls couldn't even go. So dumb. I personally don't think Harley Quinn works as a solo character anyway. She's a good secondary character or even a co-star.
Why would it effect Gambit's character? CC and FabNic didn't write him as a creep or a loser. The 2015 Gambit script sticks pretty close to the Gambit vol. 2 version of the character (although, further to my points about the film industry above, I don't know how Fox could have marketed it).
I think it's fairly obvious. I've really explained this a few times by now. In this climate we're in and pressure on studios to be pc and woke, perhaps Gambit is less flirtatious. I mean imagine what Captain Marvel might do to him if he dared hit on her. Or let's say they pair him up with Rogue early on which is a high possibility. If they focus more on her and making her cool, badass, confident, and smart and it comes at the expense of Gambit's character, that would be really frustrating. Once again... That's why I worry about him being portrayed goofy/dumb charming like Ant-Man and Star Lord. Has this point been made yet? I mean Gambit's specialty is women. He knows how to play and work everyone whether it be friend or foe but he seems to really enjoy the game when it's a woman. That would be really fun on screen. But that might be deemed problematic. That would suck.
Feige is a big X-fan and got his start producing on those movies. Gambit is one of a handful of characters who haven't been beaten to death by Fox, and he'd fit in with the street-level Falcon&TWS strand of the MCU as well as the superhero one.
I totally agree. I think he is super versatile and would really be a breath of fresh air in this mcu with some focus on him. That's why I hope none of this nonsense is a factor with him or any of the X-Men.
