Nolan's The Odyssey - Potentially could be epic or an epic flop.

[Scientifically Inaccurate]

I hate this line of reasoning these people use.

“It’s fictional! Why do you care?”

If it’s fictional, why would you go out of your way to raceswap someone? You had to put at least a little extra level of thought to do that for a fictional story.

It’s the same thing with The Little Mermaid. You cared enough to raceswap a character despite it being fictional.

This is just projection.

You're supposed to be gullible and swallow the idea that they didn't care and they just picked the best for the role and it's a giant coincidence that the best for the role happens to be a race swap, every time, even when it's a statistical improbability. Or ridiculous on its face like Ellittle Page.

They're normally open about skin color/ethnicity based casting for other ethnicities but you're supposed to ignore that. They fall back on "it's important for the story" if pressed on those, but inevitably have double standards as to what counts as important (e.g. Arabic story must have Arabs, Greek story doesn't need Greeks) and are okay with writing out reasons why a character must be an ethnicity they don't like but not the other way around.

 

[Blue Gem Kosher Queen]

Imagine the movie being perceived as so ass before release people are retroactively defending faux-Greek drab of yore.

No director working today that beats their chest about representation could ever hope to do what Michel Ocelot did with Kirikou. They don't care about other cultures, they just want the grimacing about it. They don't want the complexity, to challenge their own notions about the other. Just by pondering "what's Kirikou?" you already are putting yourself above these eejits.

There aren't well preserved epics from African or even American cultures? What about you engage their folklore and culture respectfully, on their own terms and without mystifying it, and make some damn new stuff instead of destroying someone else's history? Like King Solomon's Mines is a product of its time but is damn near revolutionary on its treatment of the native African population and that was written in 1885.