“For me it’s very important to show how loving and beautiful a queer family can be.” The countdown to disappointment starts now. “Everyone cried on set,” actor Haaz Sleiman told New Now Next. Marvel’s The Eternals won’t even be out until November, but the studio is already touting its inclusion of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s first same-sex kiss.
But the directors who include, and sometimes fight for, these moments can’t seem to resist heralding their arrivals with toots on their own horns, the way Endgame co-director Joe Russo did in advance of his one-scene appearance as the movie’s unnamed Grieving Man.
Although Beauty and the Beast’s moment is a fleeting one, David Canfield wrote in Slate that the character’s “queerness is more explicit than you might expect,” and within the cloistered world of superhero blockbusters, there is something modestly (perhaps extremely modestly) progressive about an Avengers movie pausing its world-ending clangor long enough to listen to an ordinary man’s grief about the loss of his male partner. The problem is often less with the movies themselves than with the self-congratulatory buildup to them. Austin Collins wrote in response to Star Wars’ lesbian kiss: “ too little, too late.” “The only way to talk about these benchmarks is dismissively,” Vanity Fair critic K. But for a company that has made wokeness a key component of its global brand, Disney’s failure to serve up more than table scraps, even as other areas of the culture surged past it in terms of representing the diverse world we actually live in, went from galling to unacceptable. The makers of Star Trek Beyond were eager to make sure you knew that its version of Sulu was gay, even though they edited out the only physical sign of his affections. But when it comes to including characters in their globally oriented entertainments who might not be, strictly speaking, heterosexual, Disney has been dragging its feet while loudly trumpeting the fact that it’s dragging them slightly faster than it used to.įrom the “ exclusively gay moment” in the live-action Beauty and the Beast to a kiss between two minor female characters in last year’s The Rise of Skywalker, each baby step has been preceded by a flotilla of coverage proclaiming the advance-and each has been followed by the inevitable sense of confusion and betrayal when viewers see the movie and realize, That’s it? They’ve recast The Lion King with black voice actors and Mulan with real live Asians, and they hired women and people of color to direct entries in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. and its various subsidiaries have made a public display of their push for inclusivity. In the past several years, the Walt Disney Co. There’s something else that’s so well-established that it passes almost without notice, too: the existence of LGBTQ people. There was a time when noble wizards battled fierce dragons in heroic quests, but then someone discovered electricity, and putting on robes and casting spells started to seem kind of old hat. In the world of Pixar’s Onward, magic is so commonplace it’s become unremarkable. Real-Life Bar Mitzvah Party Starters Are Not Impressed by Apple’s New Movie About Them Major League Baseball Has Never Seen Anyone Like the Pirates’ Rookie SensationĪ24’s Latest Is an Animated Film Like No Other
I Watched All Three Father of the Bride Movies, Set Over 70 Years.