DC: The Many Faces of Superheroes

 DC Films which is now headed by James Gunn and Peter Safran has a diversity problem. You look at many of the characters and also the actors who play those characters, whether hero or villain, and you say the same thing. There is a real breakdown in which race is prominent when it comes to the characters. From Ben Affleck and Henry Cavill to Dwayne Johnson and Aldis Hodge, there have been many actors to make the jump to DC but not all of them have been the same race. For example, Ben Affleck and Robert Pattinson are both Caucasian men playing Batman, whereas Jason Momoa is a Pacific Islander who falls under the Hawaiian/Pacific Islander umbrella and he plays Aquaman. 

Where things get tricky is when either the character or actor's race mixes and you have a multi-racial actor and the character is not multi-racial. I mentioned Dwayne Johnson and Aldis Hodge before and both men fall under this category. Aldis Hodge is an African American actor who is playing the character of Hawkman, who in the comics, started out as Carter Hall, a white man. This means that DC films decided to race-swap the character when they cast Aldis as their character in Black Adam. Teth-Adam otherwise known as Black Adam is another character that was race-swapped in that film. Dwayne Johnson is of Polynesian descent being half-African American and half-Samoan, and the Teth-Adam character is an Egyptian. Aldis and Dwayne are both talented men, however the filmmakers of Black Adam should have taken better care in not falling in the trap of race swapping and instead casting actors who are of the same ethnicity or close to the same one as the character. Keanu Reeves for example is a better choice for both roles being of Middle Eastern descent in his own right. Take Jason Momoa, they race-swapped Aquaman when they cast him, but that was a wise casting choice because if you look at the race of Arthur Curry and his parentage then him being White makes absolutely zero sense. 

Race-swapping in superhero movies has in essence become commonplace with Nick Fury being Black and all of the main characters in Black Adam except for Doctor Fate being race-swapped. The problem that fans have with race-swapping is that there as so quick to judge the actor instead of realizing that all these films are adaptations of the comics meaning they are able to take certain liberties. You are not going to please everyone. Marvel films did not get flack for calling the Infinity Gems Infinity Stones in the films so why should it matter if Captain America or even Superman and Aquaman are a different race. Superman for example is an alien and so is Supergirl so Sasha Calle who is now playing Supergirl and Michael B. Jordan who is rumored to be playing the new Superman can do it because Superman and Supergirl are of an alien race known as Kryptonians. The moral of the story is leave the actors alone and let them play the roles they were given. In my opinion, DC needs to follow Marvel and give actors the chance to play varying roles, since many Marvel actors have played more than one character. Also, either create a new character of find an existing character that has not been adapted to screen yet and let the actor play them instead of race-swapping because that will just add more fuel to the fire when it comes to hate from the fans.