It came in third at the box office with $19 m domestically on a budget of $110 m.
This was lower than its already conservative predictions, which were in the high 20s/low 30s.
For comparison, Lucy did $44 m in its debut.
Internationally, it did $40 m. However, international numbers are usually ignored for these comparisons because the studio doesn't get all of the money.
Is a Disappointing Ghost in the Shell the Nail in the Coffin of Hollywood Whitewashing?
It's become increasingly impossible to ignore general social pushback when it comes to Asian representation in film and television. Whether it's cut-and-dried whitewashing (e.g., casting a white performer in an Asian role) or slightly more complex cases of cultural appropriation, the hue and cry from progressive voices in film and TV criticism has called for an end to white leads in Asian and Asian-inspired properties. But Hollywood—a town driven by dollars and not always sense—is more likely to listen when protests hurt the bottom line. Ghost in the Shell, the Scarlett Johansson-starring adaptation of the popular Japanese manga, is only the latest controversial project to stumble at the box office. Will this misstep finally put an end to whitewashing?
According to Box Office Mojo, in its first weekend, Ghost in the Shell pulled in approximately $20 million domestically on a $110 million budget—below even the conservative prediction that site made earlier in the week. That number looks even more anemic when compared with Lucy, Johansson's R-rated 2014 film, which pulled in $43.8 million on its opening weekend. Unlike Ghost in the Shell, Lucy wasn't based on a pre-existing property and didn't have an established fanbase to draw on. But the Johansson casting has clearly alienated fans of the original manga and anime versions of Ghost in the Shell, and their dampened enthusiasm appears to have discouraged newcomers as well.
The controversy around Johansson's casting has plagued Ghost in the Shell since late 2014. Johansson stars as Major (whose full name is ”Major Motoko Kusanagi" in the manga), a synthetic, cybernetic body housing the brain of a dead Japanese woman. Both fans of the original and advocates for Asian actors in Hollywood argued that a Japanese actress should have been cast in the role, while a spokesperson for Ghost in the Shell publisher Kodansha gave Johansson its blessing, saying the publisher ”never imagined it would be a Japanese actress in the first place." Johansson herself defended the film this week, saying:
I think this character is living a very unique experience in that she has a human brain in an entirely machinate body. I would never attempt to play a person of a different race, obviously. Hopefully, any question that comes up of my casting will be answered by audiences when they see the film.
But it seems audiences weren't inclined to give the film that chance. There's no ignoring the fact that controversy cast a cloud over the film, and it's difficult not to draw a direct line from that to the movie's disappointing opening weekend.
Ghost in the Shell is not the first project to feel the burn of ”race-bent" casting. Though other factors may have added to their unpopularity, The Last Airbender, Exodus: Gods and Kings, Aloha, Pan, and more have all foundered at the box office. (These films also received unfavorable reviews, but bad reviews alone can't snuff out box-office potential.) Matt Damon's heavily criticized, China-set film The Great Wall didn't fare much better. In addition to becoming an Oscar night punchline for Jimmy Kimmel, the movie grossed only $45 million domestically on a $150 million budget. Marvel's too-big-to-fail Avengers installment Doctor Strange is the recent exception that proves the rule: not even Tilda Swinton's controversial casting in the historically Asian role of the Ancient One could slow this film down. It made more than $232 million domestically and $677.5 million worldwide.
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But since Netflix won't release ratings data to the public, the jury is still out on whether the Marvel brand was also enough to combat the furor over Finn Jones being cast as the historically white Danny Rand in the latest Defenders installment, Iron Fist. (This is a case in which ”cultural appropriation"—Danny is a better martial artist than all the other Asian characters around him—inspired public outcry, rather than ”whitewashing.") While various tech companies have claimed in the past to be able to analyze Netflix's data, Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos himself has historically pushed back on those results. One such company, 7Park Data, claims that Iron Fist defied both bad reviews and controversy to become Netflix's ”most-binged drama premiere"—meaning audiences allegedly tore through episodes at a faster clip than usual. But by the only Netflix-sanctioned metric available—the site's soon-to-be-gone star rating—Iron Fist is lagging behind other Defenders shows. As of publication, it had earned only three stars from users, compared with Daredevil, Jessica Jones, and Luke Cage—which all pulled in 4.25 or higher.
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But domestic box office alone may not be enough to bring about social change. With Hollywood increasingly obsessed with appealing to lucrative Asian markets abroad, it's as yet unclear whether casting white leads in Asian-centric or inspired properties hurts the global bottom line. The Great Wall, directed by Chinese legend Zhang Yimou, did decently overseas, making 86.4 percent of its total intake on foreign screens. And while Ghost in the Shell has yet to open in either Japan or China, it took in roughly $40.1 million in other foreign markets this weekend, including Russia, Germany, and South Korea. Then again, the massive global box-office returns of films with diverse casts, including Rogue One and the Fast and the Furious franchise, render any argument that Caucasian actors are required for international success null and void.
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Though America itself is a very socially divided country, the cool, impartial truth of box-office returns reveals a film and TV industry that is facing a sea change when it comes to Asian representation. History may soon look back on the Asian erasure of Doctor Strange, Iron Fist, and Ghost in the Shell with an even more unfavorable eye. Just as blackface in film and TV gradually became unacceptable (and more recently than you may think), the marginalization and appropriation of Asian culture could be on its way out the door—with these recent financial disappointments only serving as a last gasp of a bygone era.
'Ghost in the Shell': How a Complex Concept, "Whitewashing" and Critics Kept Crowds Away
While Paramount tried some innovative marketing to launch the Scarlett Johansson action film, it limped into theaters with a $19 million domestic opening.
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Opening in 3,440 locations, the movie, starring Scarlett Johansson as a cyber-warrior determined to discover the truth about her own life, pulled in just $19 million domestically — ranking third on the weekend. It was easily overshadowed by the $49 million debut of Fox/DreamWorks Animation's The Boss Baby and the third frame of Disney's Beauty and the Beast, which took in another $47.5 million.
”Ghost in the Shell suffered from tough reviews, an unfamiliarity of North American audiences with the source material, a so-called 'whitewashing' controversy that may have had an effect — though it's almost impossible to quantify that effect empirically — and a very crowded and competitive marketplace that has taken down almost as many films as it has boosted to unprecedented heights," says Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst for ComScore.
Internationally, where Ghost opened in 53 territories, it did somewhat better. Ranking second on the weekend, the pic collected $40.1 million and was No. 1 in 11 markets, including Hong Kong and Taiwan. The film, directed by Rupert Sanders (handling his first movie since 2012's Snow White and the Huntsman), is set to open in Japan and China on Friday, and given its performance in Hong Kong, it could make up some ground there. But, produced on a budget of $110 million by Paramount, DreamWorks and Reliance, Ghost now looks as if it will end up in the losing column.
In North America, the audience for the film was dominated by older males — men comprised 61 percent of the opening-weekend crowd, and 76 percent of the audience was over 25. The film played better in cities than rural areas, and it attracted a relatively upscale crowd. Forty-four percent of the audience opted to see the movie in 3D, and Imax theaters accounted for 15 percent of the opening-weekend take. All of which suggests the movie may have captured some of the longtime fanboys, familiar with the manga series by Masamune Shirow, which first appeared in 1989, and the various animated films, TV adaptations and videogames it spawned, but Ghost failed to reach out to a wider audience.
”I think in the end we did an OK job with the fan base, many of them came out," says Megan Colligan, Paramount president of worldwide distribution and marketing. ”But this movie wasn't allowed to just be a movie."
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The initial casting controversy never quite died down, though. ”What Hollywood needs to understand," Aoki tells THR, ”this is not like when Hollywood announces Michael Keaton is the new Batman or Daniel Craig is the new Bond. There was a big uproar, but the actors were able to turn them around with their approaches to the roles. But you can't change the ethnicity of an actor, and when a white actor is cast in a role that should have gone to an Asian or Asian-American, it's not just Asian-Americans who have a vested interest who are upset, but other fair-minded people as well as fans of the original anime. You can't get away with casting a white actor and think people will eventually warm up. There was a lot of social media talk, after the Super Bowl ad, for example, and a lot of it was negative. People whose first impression was, ‘I love Scarlett Johansson, she kicks ass,' may have started looking at it and thinking, ‘Maybe I shouldn't support this.'"
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And critics weren't inclined to give the film a free pass. Paramount could tell by the Google searches it was monitoring that in the final week before the film opened, potential moviegoers were checking out reviews before making a decision in higher than usual numbers.
Initially, the film's Rotten Tomatoes score rose as high as 71 percent positive reviews, based on the first enthusiastic fanboy reactions and critiques from Europe. But as the week progressed and more reviews poured in, the movie's score began to plummet, eventually falling to 42 percent. Ghost's tracking, which initially suggested the film might open in the high-$20 million range, maybe even cross over into low-$30 million territory, hit a wall.
”It was very Rotten Tomatoes-sensitive. Lots of people were seeking out information about the film," says Colligan. ”And we got hit pretty hard by the print journalists."
On the subject of whitewashing in Western Entertainment, this specific debate in relation to Ghost In The Shell and the context that surrounds the project has proved to be something of a particularly tender subject with me.
About a year ago, a thread was posted around this very topic (specifically, in relation to Johannson's casting in the lead role in Ghost in the Shell) on this very forum...which promptly lead to a similar discussion on the ongoing trend of white-washing in cinema which I readily engaged in. At the time, in looking back to my own attitude within the discussion, I can recognize that I actually acted painfully arrogant in regards to fully understanding the various issues involved...fully recognizing the need for greater racial diversity in film, but at the same time, also fully sympathizing with the prevailing mindset within the film-industry that, undoubtedly, only leads to Asian actors getting short-changed when it comes to attaining more prominent roles in both film and television. In essence, in my ascribing to tried and tested ”Star Power" formula which I felt so much of the film industry had come to revolve around, I felt that because there were so very few bankable, A-List Asian actors within the film industry...that purely from a business point of view, it was hard for me to actively resent and decry studios for making those kind of casting decisions. I reasoned that I could understand the reasoning behind a studio hiring a white actress over an Asian actress, if their basis for doing so purely amounted to simply slapping the biggest name they could possibly get on the poster as a means of luring more people into the theatre, and that such a motivation existed outside the sphere of any kind of racist bias.
Thankfully however, through the benefit of time allowing me better perspective....but more importantly still...upon reading the numerous discussions that have taken place around this debate within this community alone...I've since come to realise that not only was that perspective dangerously arrogant, it was also exactly the kind of attitude that only helps to encourage the kind of thinking that continues to push back against diversity in film and television and which excludes greater racial representation in the various types of media I continue to enjoy. Sometimes when it comes to ugly trends within the film industry, apathy can be the worst response....even in reaction to those trends that might not affect me directly as an individual.
Because yes, the numerous critics of Johannson's casting at the time for Ghost In The Shell were absolutely right on this. The studio was wrong. And ultimately, I think they still would have been wrong, even if this particular film proved to be an enormous box office success.
For many working actors who happen to belong to any kind of minority group working within the entertainment industry today (in this particular case, Asian actors)....I think, it often proves to be a struggle to secure roles that don't specifically revolve around their ethnicity. And as such, those particular performers aren't afforded the same wealth of opportunities that white actors in the West continue to enjoy, affording them far less freedom and flexibility in terms of their careers in comparison to their white contemporaries. With this in mind, when a precious opportunity opens up that specifically calls for a minority to take on a leading role in a particularly high profile project...it should always an opportunity that should be seized readily. In this instance, in granting minority actors those kind of opportunities, you not only help to introduce more racial and cultural diversity into an industry that so sorely requires it...but even in a more practical sense, it will be a means that will allow minority actors to attain far greater visibility in terms of their careers, helping to create more bankable and identifiable stars which the studio won't need to be so resistant to hiring in the future. It's a means of breaking the cycle that the film industry (and to a lesser extent, the television industry) seems to be so terrified to break out of.
Furthermore though, in terms of doing our part, when it comes to these particular casting decisions in relation to studios choosing to hire white actors over other actors belonging to different minority's (like with Ghost In The Shell, or indeed with Doctor Strange or something like The Last Airbender)...I think it's perhaps equally important that people make a conscious effort to support minority actors, as well as any projects they might be actively involved in, as a means of helping the entertainment industry to view those actors as much more of a risk, in comparison to the predominantly white actors they view to be more bankable leading stars. If money is all the studios understand, perhaps people should use their money to send a message. And if one studio gets the message, perhaps the rest will fall in line, helping to gradually phase out the industry's compulsive need to hand over valuable minority roles to white actors at almost each and every turn. Perhaps then hopefully, the issue of white-washing will prove to be a thing of the past, as we these industries can move on to creating a far more interesting and racially diverse cultural landscape in regards to broader racial representation.
If anything good has come out of this Ghost In The Shell controversy, I would say how that it's encouraged these debates about the prevalent issue of white-washing in the entertainment industry, allowing many minority groups to give voice to their growing concerns about the issue. In doing so, these subsequent discussions have helped to enlighten people like myself....who were once adopted much more arrogant and dismissive attitudes about this particular issue. And although that certainly might not be viewed as progress enough in regards to helping the film and television industry move past the recurring problem of white-washing...I think I would still view that as a positive, if admittedly small, change all the same, even if there's still so much more progress to be made.
Sorry about the essay, or if I'm literally just repeating the same points everyone else has made in this discussion in the most ineloquent manner imaginable. Please forgive me.
