I didn't realize these films were for white people. Also, "your people of color", I mean if we want to go after each other we could probably go crazy introspecting each other (I know you can find some dumb things I've said).
These projects are intended to be inoffensive first and foremost so as to maximize profits and that means casting cishet white people in all the roles, doing the majority of the heavy-lifting. They're kept dumbed-down because the second you throw in someone who actually has shit to worry about and that influences how they see art and media you wind up rocking the boat and the capitalists don't like that. Again, the MCU:
Black Widow didn't get merchandise or a film because she's a woman and nobody wants to focus on women because "women don't sell". The driving force is all about money. Hell, even the uptick in women in later MCU films was still all about proving "no, don't worry, we can still feed your greed with women we swear!" But progress and inclusion is always a slow, slow go. We're still stuck with cishet men and women as characters, with a grand total of two women-led movies from the MCU (four if we count DC's
Wonder Woman films) and again, two of those are about white cishet-passing women and the two
Wonder Woman films are about cishet-passing women.
Let me use a different example: I recently watched the new Christmas movie
Happiest Season. It's a sappy Christmas romcom about two lesbians, one of which is introducing her girlfriend to her family for the first time...but the family doesn't know either of them are gay! For all the things the film really nails--how weird and out of touch cishet people are--the film is still about a predominantly white cast with the actors of colors relegated to maybe five lines and no real character development. Mackenzie Davis and Kristen Stewart are a killer couple (tall girls x short girls is so fucking gay) but the film is still ultimately a look into queerness through the eyes of whiteness. It's very safe and meant to be as inoffensive as possible. There are no trans women in the film, either, which writes the impression that trans women aren't a part of lesbian relationships. There's a prolonged drag queen scene at a gay bar which is also really disappointing, too, because that's the only depiction of gender non-conforming characters in that film.
So, yeah, when I think of the idea of "let's cast our only performers of color as makeup characters!" I find that pretty yikes. The Titans production team not doing that to their original two people of color performers and in fact bringing in two more major characters played by people of color for the second season--one of them being trans, even!--is much more reassuring to me.
