‘Alita Battle Angel’ Filmmakers: There’s ‘No Whitewashing’

www.vulture.com: Robert Rodriguez and Jon Landau — co-writer/director and producer, respectively, of the December manga movie-adaptation Alita: Battle Angel — have absorbed certain hard lessons from the financial underperformance and general audience disdain toward Ghost in the Shell. The $110 million Scarlett Johansson sci-fi thriller, itself an adaptation of a long-running Japanese comic book series, arrived in multiplexes in March last year amid fan petitions and howls of controversy over its perceived whitewashing of Johansson’s lead character. The scuttlebutt surrounding her casting — to the exclusion of Asian actresses who lobbied for the role — helped scare off Ghost’s core fanboy audience, resulting in a gigantic flop for the film’s distributor Paramount.