I don’t think the casting of the new Star Wars heroes was weird. Disney was looking to expand the audience for Star Wars. They saw that series like Fast and Furious, with nowhere near the pop culture dominance of Star Wars, is a billion-dollar franchise in part because of its diverse cast. And with diversity and inclusion being the watchwords in Hollywood right now, and also some vocal online advocates of diversity, it was good business to make Star Wars more diverse. I think the issue is how they went about it.
Disney/Kathleen Kennedy has been obtuse in how they’ve handled this diversity, giving ammunition to right-leaning critics who criticize diversity and multiculturalism. The new films have Rey who is awesome, just because, and if you put that out, you’re a misogynist. There's not much to the Rey character (not Daisy Ridley's fault) except that she is a female. And TLJ took away her major character issue, her search for her parents. It didn't remove her overall search for identity and she still has the mission now to save the Resistance/Rebellion, but that's not that different than from what we've seen before with Luke and far less dramatically interesting than what Luke was working with. Though it likely fits the themes of female empowerment and a woman finding her voice. How does that factor into the whole saga is anyone's guess. Because once Rey finds that voice what happens then? Her character wasn't well-conceived, just like the other new heroes. Who is Poe exactly? They made him a rash, hothead in TLJ but why is he fighting for the Resistance? Why is he so rash? And we have gotten more of Finn's motivations, but still no real backstory (even of his time in the First Order) and he's a checklist of stereotypes so much it makes his character unappealing. (To be fair, there are comics and books that provide some information on these characters, but that's a cop out to me if a movie has to rely on ancillary material to tell the story we should be seeing on screen or hearing in the dialogue.) I mean TLJ actually did a good job with Rose. We saw her sister, we got a little of her backstory, and we know why she's fighting. So it's not impossible to do these things in a Star Wars film. I think the problems stem from TFA not really having an idea of who these characters were, and were more concerned with what they were (in terms of race/ethnicity/gender) and that Abrams thought the future directors would just figure it out. Rian Johnson really didn't want to so he just started upsetting the apple cart. Where Disney lucked up is that the casting is good and Boyega in particular has chemistry with Oscar Isaacs and Daisy Ridley. Based on chemistry alone, Finn should be the center of the new sequels.
I think Disney was eager to get the headlines about how progressive and feminist Rey was and that that would inoculate them against any white male backlash. With TFA I think they were proven right, when it came to box office. The hubbub about Finn before TFA died down and was rightly made to look foolish and perhaps Disney thought they could ridicule all future critics, or that the critics would expose themselves as foolish. Little attention was paid to the criticism of the Finn character after the film came out. There didn’t appear to be much of a groundswell of that criticism (not enough I suppose to get Disney’s attention, and it’s not like Disney or the media is all that attuned to discussions about racial depictions), but it was around on the internet.
I think Disney thought that white males were a captive audience, that they had reached peak saturation with them and were looking to expand by capturing every other demographic group. While the sequel films have been noticeably more colorful, white characters, particularly white females remain at the center, so it’s not really a change in the racial hierarchy, it is a changing of the guard where gender is concerned, and some white males aren’t having that.
The Last Jedi triggered some white male backlash (but it’s not only white males who have issues with this film-on You Tube there are some black men, some white women, and at least one Asian female reviewer I watched who all had issues with TLJ). I do suspect that a lot of criticism for TLJ is from alt-right corners, but the media pushback that all of the film’s critics are from those corners is not helping the reputation of the movie nor has it silenced the people who are criticizing the film. It's likely emboldened those critics, as noted by the dropping fan score on Rotten Tomatoes. It’s painting the criticizers with a broad brush. And if it’s not the alt-right that’s the cause, it’s ‘old fans’ (which also overlaps with the alt-right charges). And these ‘old fans’ are being condescended to in the media, and online, that they have to ‘let go’ and they shouldn’t expect ‘fan service’ and so forth. I don’t think the media response has been well handled for this film. I think Hollywood needed Star Wars to be a massive hit because the industry needed it so they are pulling out all the stops to save the reputation of TLJ and attempt to dismiss the criticisms.
I don’t know what the numbers of black fans of Star Wars is. It seems like there has been a sizable number of black fans over the years-as for the diehard fans-don’t know about that number. That being said, Star Wars hasn’t been the most welcoming place for black fans if those black fans were concerned about representation. And Finn is a step backward when it comes to representation so I can see why many black folks aren’t cheering for this new round of films. At least you had veteran black actors like Billy Dee Williams and Samuel L. Jackson in the previous films, actors who had built up a reputation among the black community in the US. John Boyega, no fault of his, hasn’t done that. Perhaps Star Wars, while looking internationally, was also just expecting blacks to jump at any black person that was prominently featured in a Star Wars movie, that didn’t turn out to be the case. No fault again of Boyega’s. But when you pick a relative unknown actor, from another country, and then saddle him with a stereotype-plagued character, that doesn’t enthuse black audiences-outside of some black nerds who I suspect were just hungry for any representation in Star Wars and identified with Finn. Finn came along in some ‘woke’ times and that might not be going down well for black audiences. Plus, not having Lando in the new films, and also crapping on the original heroes likely pissed off some black fans who overlapped into the ‘old fan’ category.
