12 Movie Casting Decisions That Fans Couldn't Handle

5. Scarlett Johansson - The Major (Ghost In The Shell)

For as long as cinema has existed, Hollywood has been guilty of whitewashing characters to cynical ends, shoehorning whiter-than-white brand names into roles that, by all rights, should be played by people from the character's actual race or ethnicity.

And though we're (thankfully) decades removed from John Wayne donning "brown-up" and a ridiculous Fu Manchu moustache to play Genghis Khan, white actors are still routinely being cast in roles not really meant for them.

Case in point, eyebrows were raised when Scarlett Johansson was cast as The Major in Hollywood's big-budget adaptation of Ghost in the Shell.

In the manga, the character was Japanese (naturally), and many felt that casting a white American actress was insulting if not downright offensive. Petitions were even circulated requesting Johansson to be recast, but to no avail.

Did It Work Out?: Johansson was fine enough in the part, but both her performance and the film as a whole struggled to escape the icky feeling that the casting invited.

Moreover, the script misguidedly attempted to fold the whitewashing controversy into the plot, by revealing in act three that Johansson's shell in fact housed the soul of the original Japanese woman, Motoko Kusanagi.

Some saw it as a bold and ambitious attempt to confront the hand-wringing head-on, but most simply thought it was rubbing salt in the wound - the filmmakers wanted to whitewash their movie and make a half-assed attempt to justify it narratively.

"Justice" prevailed for the complainers, though, as the film tanked critically and commercially.