“Fan-baiting” is marketing with the intent of artificial controversy
old.reddit.com
old.reddit.com
In many cases, I think the outrage is fostered to have cover-fire for incompetent and talentless hacks.
A few hateful tweets against an actor in an incompetently made movie is a dream-come true for the production team that made a bad movie. Incompetent hacks get to put the focus of their failure as belonging to bigots with hateful tweets rather than having everybody focusing on the bad story, poor cinematography, badly managed production, poor acting, etc.
When the story becomes a few mean tweets and not the bad movie itself, the media that otherwise would have harped on the bad production ignores everything else to support "the message". Viola: much criticism against you disappears and you have an excuse to your bosses for your failures.
Don't try to tell me Disney adopting a "keep white characters white" policy would have made everyone happy, there would have been no controversy, and we'd all be judging this film based strictly off its cinematic merits.
I'm not Caucasian but to distill a growing population of people's irritation with film studios wanting to rewrite all major iconic characters of their childhood as minorities of LGBT as simply them being "irrational" is a very shallow way of looking at it.
Disney has access to more data on sentiment and consumer choice than we do and they would know just as we do there is growing push-back against this sort of thing.
From what I've seen, people would have no issues with a bunch of new characters being introduced that are minority, LGBT or whatever social issue we're servicing this quarter. They might express surprise that big companies are willing to spend so much time and effort on characters that don't represent the majority of the population and they'll probably vote with their wallets by not seeing films that don't represent them or pander to social issues instead of focusing on entertaining. But you wouldn't have this growing vocal annoyance.
You'll need to explain why having access to customer sentiment and demographics... and seeing the reaction to multiple big releases that have been panned / been commercial failures, they want to continue making such choices. At the very least they could vary it up right?
Unless their ESG overlords don't allow them
So you're saying if Disney were to make a new star wars movie with a brand new character who was a stormtrooper who happened to be played by a black actor, there would be no controversy? How about if Amazon made a Lord of the Rings TV show and some of the newly created Elf characters weren't white? No one would have any issue there either, right?