15 Most Controversial Movie Moments 2016

Benedict Cumberbatch fronted Marvel adaptation Doctor Strange was lavished with praise and big box office profits when it was released this year. But the film wasn’t without its critics either who protested the casting of Tilda Swinton as the Ancient One – a character who, in the Doctor Strange comics, is a Tibetan male. Marvel defended the casting choice, stating that the Ancient One is not a fixed character but rather a moniker passed from person to person and, in the case of bringing Doctor Strange to the big screen, that moniker just so happened to get passed to a Celtic-looking embodiment rather than a Tibetan one. Which would have been a passable enough excuse had co-screenwriter C. Robert Cargill not also stated that changing the character from Tibetan to Celtic was a conscious decision so as not to alienate the potentially profitable Chinese market. Oops.

Director Scott Derrickson has offered his two cents too, saying that he didn’t want to recreate the kind of Fu Manchu stereotype he interpreted the Ancient One as in the comics and that reshaping the character as a white, middle-aged woman allowed him to avoid this. He also points out that beyond the Ancient One’s gender and ethnicity swap he also changed the character Mordo from white to black and upgraded the role of Wong, played by British-Asian actor Benedict Wong thankfully, from a stereotypical Asian manservant to a librarian and mentor. Which is basically the movie’s entire diversity quota met, right?