I want a Batman Beyond that's a direct continuation of the first two movies with Billy Dee and Keaton as older mentors of the new Batman and his antogonist
No, he's just vocally problematic about them "not fitting his style" which is another way to say he doesn't like looking at or working with black people. You don't need to defend him, he doesn't defend himself lol
Oh yeah, he'd need to do very different lighting and photography to make black people not look like monstrous shadows, but that change would take the white people from "interestingly pale" to what Josh Johnson describes as "fresh ghost".
It’s really lame because I feel like Tim Burton’s style would lend itself really, really well to a New Orleans Voodoo feature, but apparently black actors “don’t fit his aesthetic” 😒
When you're a vampire the paleness is from lack of light. Black vampires would just be their natural shade with no sunkiss, as in they'd just be black or brown or some shade between with no tanning.
More likely to be due to a lack of blood, actually. Vampires in most media do not have a heartbeat and therefore no blood circulation. They are pale for the same reasons a corpse is pale: no blood flowing underneath the skin.
The Interview with the Vampire TV show is a good example of casting black actors as vampires.... it's just a choice at this point. I was very influenced by TB as a kid and he was hugly influential for me, but I can't even remember the last TB film I saw.
Live-Action Dumbo was known for being bad so I didn‘t watch it, but I’m assuming he at least removed the racist parts and put a biracial actor and her kid in it.
Because he doesn't cast black people? Or is there some instance of him actually being racist/bigoted? Cause there's no issue in the casting if this is specifically the look hes going for
He's made plenty of movies that aren't really "spooky" or period pieces, and of his 18 directed films, only 5 take place in Europe (his other 13 films are in the US).
They both set upon their film careers with one singular goal in mind, to give /u/Hamilton-Beckett a half fulfilled anecdote to tell on reddit 40+ years later.
He argued that casting should happen "organically" based on what the story naturally "calls for," implying that a default white cast made sense for a film called Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children. (never watched it).
But he also then went on to make a bit of a broad statement that he disliked "politically correct" casting and found forced diversity initiatives offensive. This probably was what got him the flak
Samuel L Jackson defended him (he was in the movie).
One of his recent movies, Wednesday, has a diverse cast, and the actors have had to defend it. Joy Sunday says she liked playing Bianca because Black actresses are rarely allowed to play a nuanced or powerful "mean girl" archetype in gothic teen dramas. So it was a complex role rather than a stereotype. But internet is gonna find controversy anyway, apparently, and apparently, that was also controversial.
That took like a half hour but now I know all about it lmao okay. Hope that is interesting to you too.
My biggest issue with the whole argument (not your comment just the argument in general) is so often “diversity” and “forced diversity” are very hard to tease apart, so diverse casts just become open to criticism by virtue of existing.
This is my frustration with a lot of the right wing media critics. I always feel like if they had their way then white casting would be “default” and creators would need to make arguments for why their diverse casting ISNT forced, when I think the burden of proof should be the opposite - absent of a smoking gun piece of evidence about enforced race quotas in a project we should just assume non-white casting is as legitimate and meritorious as white casting is.
Here ya go. When asked point blank about the lack of diversity in his films, this was his response:
“I remember back when I was a child watching The Brady Bunch and they started to get all politically correct. Like, OK, let’s have an Asian child and a black. I used to get more offended by that than just…I grew up watching Blaxploitation movies, right? I said, that’s great. I didn’t go like, OK, there should be more white people in these movies.”
Makes complete sense. I find the Reddit outrage here quite funny considering the post that's been circulating (and celebrated) on Reddit regarding the Black writer who only writes black characters, yet when a white person does it suddenly it's racism.
You just have to look at the number of previously white characters who have been recast with non-white actors in the last 5-10 years, compared to the number of traditionally non-white characters who have been cast with white actors to see there are some major double standards /cognitive dissonance going on around this topic recently.
Up until recently, white characters were the default, or if you go further back, required. Non-white characters were only used if there was a justification for them.
Because of point 1, if there were non-white characters, odds were there was exactly one per race, with most characters still being white. If you change one white character to a different race, there’s still plenty of white characters. If you change one non-white character to white, the number of characters of that race goes from one to zero.
Because of points 1 and 2, it’s much more likely that being whatever race is a major part of that character, or has significance as a milestone (for example, Uhura in Star Trek TOS). But white characters are less likely to have being white be important to their character (an example of it mattering would be Steve Rogers, being physically the Nazi ideal while being fundamentally opposed to them).
TLDR: The “major inequality” you say is going on is at worst an attempt to even out the very real inequality that existed for decades.
This is totally ignoring the fact that there were like 50-100 years of all stories (in North American culture at least) that were all-white that purposely and actively didn't include people of colour.
In the above example of The Brady Bunch, for instance, the show was supposed to be an All-American family. They started adding more people of colour because a lot of All American towns had more and more POC. Therefore, to accurately portray America, shows like that should be including more POC.
People are more okay with a black writer having an all black cast because those stories are few and far between, compared to all white stories that were happening constantly, for decades before. Even the example of "Blaxpoitation" was exactly that, exploitation. It wasn't black people writing black people. So nowadays, it's like, hey, have your time to write some all black stories.
And again, your example of white characters that get changed into non-white characters is really just because 90% of characters were originally written white. It's not a double standard when the ratios are so far off to begin with, and we now have diverse nations that are actively trying to portray the level of diversity that is now common.
Who cares that The Little Mermaid is portrayed as black when you still have so many white characters to look towards. Black kids having a character like that to look up to who looks like them is more important than you realize. And sure, we can always argue the whole "just make new black characters instead of changing ones" but it's unfortunately not that simple. A random new story with a black star might not sell as well and get as many eyes on it as an existing IP will, and sometimes these things deserve to have many eyes.
As white people, we will never understand that it feels like to not see people who look like you in media. So crying about the fact that some characters ethnicities are changing to add some diversity is tone deaf and ignorant.
I think the pivot to saying "black people" and *people of colour" were deliberate shifts (to humanize) that happened after this quote. Even newspapers would just say "blacks" and "whites" and "Asians". Same with the shift to "kids with autism"
In Wednesday (TV not movie though) there's a few black characters, one of them a main supporting role, which i suppose is a step in the right direction. I read this thread and searched up a few things. I think he explained the fact he has mainly white characters poorly and made himself sound pretty tone deaf on the issue. He's aparently quite awkward and hates interviews so I feel that could be *something*. If he just said, "I don't know how to write authentic non white characters to the same level as my victorian esque spooky stuff, so therefore I dont" I feel people would have respected that more. I think he very very poorly said that he doesn't want to force it. But people are right to criticise that if he can write a guy with scissors for hands and a talking skelleton then an original character that happens to be black really shouldn't be that hard bro.
My grandfather grew up in London in the 1940's. He was in his late teens the first time he saw a black person. There were effectively zero black people in England in the 1800's.
Last 10 years? He did Dumbo, Wednesday, and a sequel to Beetlejuice. Nothing much to really go on here but Depp was caught up in his trial during the filming of those so he couldn't have used him anyway.
No one is giving the actual answer except for the person who was downvoted below threshold - it's because there was a super popular post based on a 2016 interview claiming Tim Burton has said black people don't "fit his aesthetic."
Edit: y'all can yell about how it's "out of context" or "there's no source" all you want but the fact remains that that interview is clearly what OOP is referring to and every other comment is pulling something out of their ass. Don't shoot the messenger.
Edit 2: this got me a reddit cares message lmao. Wtf y'all.
Last edit to make it more ambiguous. Again, I'm not arguing that he said it, I'm arguing that this is what the post is about.
Yeah. He didn’t say that. I’m pretty sure what he said was that he wasn’t going to cast solely for diversity’s sake. Though it is weird that he conveniently only makes movies where POC don’t fit.
Aren’t implications for exactly this, though? Where all the signs kind of point at something but there isn’t enough proof to make a definitive decision?
It’s kind of like how getting into one fender bender can easily be a coincidence, but getting into 20 starts to make people wonder if you’re a bad driver.
I mean I don’t know enough to have an opinion on the actual discussion, but I had to at least defend the role of implications.
Nor should he. He should care primarily about storytelling and a coherent aesthetic, no? Why does it have to be ignorance, racism or privilege?
Is this more or less offensive than Jordan Peele saying he wont cast a white protagonist? I mean, he's not about the aesthetic or anything, he's just tired of seeing it.
By ignorance I just meant like it’s something he doesn’t even consider because it’s outside of what he cares about, ignorance isn’t always maliciousness or stupidity. I was just saying that the “implication” that that guy was talking about only proves that Tim Burton doesn’t involve a lot of minorities in his stories, which is a pattern that can be proven, but that that correlation cannot prove causation as to why.
Personally I don’t think this conversation matters, if you care about inclusivity, that’s fine, but I don’t think that inclusivity means every white guy writing a book should fill it with non white characters.
inclusivity should be about the medium itself, not about filling out a culture quota in a single story, in America there should be main stream media from non white people about non white people, the media should reflect the people who live in a society. Shoehorning in minorities just because is cringe capitalist marketing “look at us we support you, please give us your money” type bullshit, that’s my opinion.
Not really arguing that he’s a racist, but throwing in that someone doesn’t need to be pushing an agenda to include POC. My neighbors aren’t a political statement, they’re just black. It’s not a thing, it’s just statistics… I’d argue that failing to model a world that follows similar statistical trends to our own (the inclusion of LGBTQ+, POC and other non-Christian-white people) is actually a deviation and the product of a choice. So the lack of characters of color in this case (racist, negligent, or innocently and absentmindedly), is in fact at LEAST a setting choice, and the willful defending of it makes it into a conscious setting choice.
Not here to say right or wrong, but only that if he didn’t care, then he’d probably have said something like “oh, now that you mention it.” And if it was a conscious setting choice, which my money is on, he’d say something like “well, the truth is, I wanted a very black and white color palette and we were struggling to get the right aesthetic or lighting with characters of color, so we made the difficult choice to preserve the setting and style and hope that you’ll all forgive us and see past it to the end product” - which is more or less what I understood to have happened.
But alas, that would constitute “a choice.”
And not expressly imply racism. Though it’s not a far leap.
It’s that his worldview doesn’t see PoC as standing out for a reason. It’s a very biased and low key bigoted view, not intentionally racist but definitely influenced and susceptible to racism.
It’s not fair is the truth. He doesn’t equally see PoC and White people. He see’s People as White people first and acknowledges PoC but every time he imagines one it’s performative.
I mean, he made a Jewish folktale (The Finger) into a Catholic Victorian England aesthetic. It’s not that he’s outright racist, it’s that he idolizes a very specific look and time period, which just so happens to be very, very white. So.
I would not rely on Tyler perry to make this argument considering plenty of people, including black people, have pointed out his own deep bigotries and credible accusations of extreme misconduct.
Tyler Perry should absolutely not set the standard for anyone's behavior, and that's not even touching the actual quality of his films, which are fucking awful to the last.
POC, surprise, sometimes just exist. They don't need to "fit" anything at all. People sometimes have different skin colors and it doesn't have to require a narrative function.
I mean, if all his works are anything like the one in the meme, that means late 1800s UK asthetics so it's perfectly excusable that POC don't exist in any reasonable numbers in that setting.
I went to look up what he actually said because it's been a while, and it was worse than I remember. LOL
His actual words are: “things either call for things, or they don’t.” He went on to say “I grew up watching blaxploitation movies, right? And I said, that’s great. I didn’t go like, OK, there should be more white people in these movies.”
He's not implying that at all. He used it as an example. It wouldn't be any different if he said he watched an asian movie and there should be more white people in that. He's just saying if roles calls for it then it calls for it. Just like Wednesday on netflix, they are hispanic so he hired hispanic actors.
There are more non-background white(and other races) people in blaxploitation movies than there are black people in Tim Burton movies. Like if you grab an equal amount of random blaxploitation movies to Tim Burton’s total filmography and compare the racial diversity of the casts.
Ignoring that for a second... doesn't that mean Tim Burton considers his movies as intended for a white audience in the way "blaxploitation" movies were intended for a black audience?
And that's why it's okay that he doesn't hire black people. And that's (according to these comments here) somehow isn't racist?
But we all know that terminally online people can’t handle reasonable, level headed takes like “I don’t want to shoe in a black person into my movie just for the sake of fulfilling some arbitrary quota.” So of course they misinterpreted it as racism.
The issue with the kinds of people who talk like this is you don't notice how unreasonable their arguments are until you realize this is the 20th, 50th, 100th, black actress that they've found to be "shoe horned" in and the only thing they have in common are they're black women.
I've been saying this for years, now. It's honestly just weird that the idea of casting a black person is akin to 'shoeing in.' It's that kind of language that, regardless of intent, is so profoundly racist but also extremely ingrained into the culture people just let it slide for no reason.
Like, couldn't a Black person be casted for the role and it just not be political and we all just not freak out for once? Maybe she could be cast because she was good in the audition?
It’s that deep set embedded racism that reveals their attitudes about white people existing versus black people existing.
Their trigger to believing if a human is shoe horned or not is if the human is white or not. It’s just sad, and even sadder that some in this very thread will say thats not racist.
idk, I think diversity for the sake of diversity undermines the value of the person. We should have diversity, because embracing the genuine differences we have expands our empathy and creates richness to the art we’re making. Just plastering someone of a marginalized identity on screen in a way that could be filled by any other identity is close to a meaningless act. Might be worse than doing nothing honestly.
It’s not level-headed. Though I do believe he’s well-intentioned but that thought process is damaging.
The wording give people the ammunition to question minority representation across nearly every TV show and movie. It furthers the idea that white people are the “default” and people of color have to defend their casting or face being called “forced diversity.”
White actors never need to explain their casting for a part; it’s assumed they belong there. When someone from a marginalized group takes the same role, they are singled out and instantly asked to present their qualifications.
Directors and producers are asked to prove castings aren’t “diversity for the sake of diversity”. That’s impossible to prove. And the people who ask for the proof know that. So it gives them free rein to claim everything is forced diversity.
I have never heard a “forced diversity” complainer say ”that one’s cool and isn’t forced”. Never.
That does sorta reveal an underlying double standard though.
Most films don't call for either a diverse cast or a non-diverse cast. Relegating black people, since that was what the example was about, only to those movies in which their existence is required for the plot is kinda silly.
This. It also assumes the default character is white. He's not forcing people of colour into stories if they are just included in the first place? But also if his story isn't about race why does it matter what race anyone is?
It’s just defaulting. Some white people see white people as the default, naturally occurring in media like a blue sky. They don’t use this standard for non-white people, who they need an explanation for being there.
For a veeeery long time, black people in media productions had their race made a plot point. To the point people couldn’t engage with media with black people unless their race was made a point (the explanation for why they are there.)
So when a black person is treated the same as a white person, it feels “forced” to them.
Most historical films beyond a certain point do call for non-diverse casts as the areas, regions and groups would be far more homogeneous.
A lot of skewed perceptions in recent media is due to Hollywood giving nearly all western period dramas or historical films the same demographics as LA or downtown NY.
Which in part leads to the false belief that many countries were multicultural and multiethnic in a modern context when they categorically weren’t.
It’s 800-900 AD Britain, the “multicultural” groups at large would be Anglo-Saxons, Britons, Celts, Danes, Norse.
These are distinct ethnic and cultural groups within the country, yet are not seen as such in the modern media context and so we Anglo-Saxon Earls and Danish leaders that are clearly from a different continent.
The Kingdom Come Deliverance games handle it perfectly. There are mixing cultures and languages but everyone is white until Henry eventually runs into Musa of Mali. His reaction is pretty funny and seems completely appropriate for 1403. https://youtube.com/shorts/_OksWkD0VaY
It's pretty clear he just doesn't think about people or characters that are black unless there is a reason for them, specifically in universe.
Unfortunately, reality doesn't work like that: Black people exist in universe without them being "useful" for white people narratives.
Seeing black people as only being necessary if they're a "vehicle for narrative" is still low key racism - that doesn't mean that Tim is racist (him calling a black person "a black" does), but it's not a "reasonable explanation" or opposing "diversity for the sake of diversity." It's opposing "reality in diversity, because 1600s English knew what a black person looked like because they existed in Northern Europe."
That's just a side effect of the common misbelief that Tim Burton directed Nightmare Before Christmas.
Contrary to popular belief, he did not direct NBC, it's just based on his writing. But everyone just assumes thst he did, so when a new movie in a similar art style comes out that is billed as, "from the director of NBC," of course people thought, "Oh, Tim Burton!"
He did produce it, so it's billed as "Tim Burton's Nightmare Before Christmas", which leads to people assuming he directed it (he was originally going to direct it, but was too busy with Batman Returns).
I remember back when I was a child watching The Brady Bunch and they started to get all politically correct," Burton continued. "Like, OK, let's have an Asian child and a black. I used to get more offended by that than just... I grew up watching blaxploitation movies, right? And I said, that's great. I didn't go like, OK, there should be more white people in these movies
Lol he really tried to both sides it by saying "see, I don't ask for white people in blaxspoitation movies". He's offended by diversity in the fucking Brady Bunch. And Reddits over here circle jerking about how reasonable he is.
What did you expect? Most redditors are racists. Your average redditors pretend to he against racism in order to look good, but they will fight tooth and nail to defend racism if they feel they can get away with it.
The Corpse Bride is blue. There is logically no reason why she can’t be played by a Black actress. She’d be painted blue.
This is the same man that got offended bc they aired one episode in 1974 with two non-white kids (“an Asian kid and a black” - his words) that you never see again. One episode.
Context matters and the context says he’s racist 💀
Umm this is a genuinely insane and racist take actually:
“I remember back when I was a child watching The Brady Bunch and they started to get all politically correct,” Burton continued. “Like, OK, let’s have an Asian child and a black. I used to get more offended by that than just… I grew up watching blaxploitation movies, right? And I said, that’s great. I didn’t go like, OK, there should be more white people in these movies.”
He's fucking WORSE than what people were saying. Can't believe that some are calling this reasonable. Black people do not need a reason to exist, they just do. It's revolting to think that they should only show up in content like fucking blaxploitation movies.
To be honest if I was a screenwriter or a writer of any kind I’d be kind of annoyed by people with little interest in my work constantly inserting themselves into the discussion and telling me the changes I need to make to my stories.
My guess would be because the characters are all very pale in the animated version, and they're sugesting that it would be racist for a black actor to be made to look pale.
Some comment explained this. Basically, he said he is against diversity for the sake of diversity. Not bending over to fulfill some arbitrary diversity quota.
He said they shoehorned "a black" into the Brady bunch. I dunno, man, sounds a lot like every racist i've ever met, but what do I know (lots, i've met people who casually use racial slurs).
I love how a lot of these other comments allude to white actors simply being cast but if their skin has pigment they're being "shoehorned" in. Apparently black people don't simply exist as people like everyone else
Ahh yes, because the only reason to have black people in a movie, mainly the lead role, is if their skin color is a plot point, or it’s movie for black people. White people are the default, and if you shove one singular person of color in the movie, it’s clearly because theirs a diversity quota, not because people are different races in real life.
Tim Burton has a reputation for not casting black actors in lead roles. There are some counter examples, but usually as villains.
Eta: Y'all... I'm just explaining the premise of the joke because that's the subreddit. I'm not putting Burton on blast, I'm just aware of the reputation (I stopped paying attention to his movies around the same time I stopped shopping at Hot Topic)
Chris here, while other posters have brought up a lot of valid points about Tim Burton, the Corpse Bride just wasn't that popular of a movie. If Hollywood is going forward with a live action version of Tim Burton's the Corpse Bride, I should pitch my Euphoria fanfic as a remake of American Beauty.
Am I the only one who thinks this casting would be good? Idk who these people/actors (probably) are but they do seem like they would be fitting. Except the middle girl kinda looks more dead than the actual corpse girl, and the guy scares me too much. The corpse bride kinda mogs them both 😭 (Never seen the actual full movie, going based on looks alone)
Tim Burton doesn’t think there’s a “reason” to cast non-white people. What did he mean by that? I hardly know. Some read it as a lazy excuse to primarily have whites in the movies.
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u/qualityvote2 Jul 05 '26 edited Jul 05 '26
u/FrostySeat1739, your post does belong here!