casting white people is racism now?
Well, it's either casting all the lead characters as white, in a story set in Japan, or changing it so that it's set in America. The second option would at least make sense. In either case, how it's done could be, or could not be, racist. If Scarlett Johansen is still called "Kusunagi" then that will just be retarded. White Japanese people would be silly. White people
pretending to be Japanese would be about as racist as blackface.
I guess in the cyberpunk future, Japan isn't 98% ethnic Japanese?
The live action version of Tiger and Bunny won't have that problem. I'm much more optimistic about that than Ghost in the Shell. For Tiger and Bunny, you have a series which is pretty obscure, set in an alternate-Earth
America, and it's being produced by Ron Howard in collaboration with the producer of the Japanese anime version. I'm optimistic that the adapters actually see the value in the source material, rather than are just milking it as a cash-cow.
Meanwhile, the director for Ghost in the Shell is only known for making that one version of Snow White which starred the girl from Twilight.
I'm pinning anime live-action adaptations as a possible next big thing after Marvel / DC starts to cannibalize itself. It only needs 1 big hit then a whole lot of stuff would get picked up. There's a nice site I found which lists up-coming superhero movies (and a few anime ones) for the next 4-5 years:
http://www.superherohype.com/upcoming-moviesAquaman movie.
LEGO Batman movie Shazam movie.
Ant-Man and the Wasp movie. Looking at the longterm picture it looks like almost 1 new superhero movie every month for the next 5 years, and a lot of them are less than household names to regular viewers. What's most likely is
not that all these movies succeed, but people start becoming much more picky about what superhero movies they actually go and watch.