There was some outrage a few weeks back that the cast of M Night Shyamalan’s adaptation of Avatar: The Last Airbender (not to be confused with James Cameron’s Avatar: The Last Pixelbender) was a little too lily white. See, the cartoon on which it’s based sports a very multicultural cast, and most of the people who M Night announced were complete peckerwoods. And that’s coming in a movie from a guy who is not white himself – minorities, you cannot win in Hollywood.
Anyway, some of that blinded by the white may be fixed, as pop star (allegedly. Never heard of this fucker before, unless he’s Paul’s grandson) Jesse McCartney had to drop out of the film due to prior commitments in regards to the soul he sold in order to be famous to the Nickelodeon hopped up on box juice crows. That gave M Night the opportunity to swoop in and replace McCartney with a non-white person: in this case Dev Patel from Slumdog Millionaire.
Patel will be playing a bad guy (are the good guys still all white? I don’t know who is who with this property and I draw a line when it comes to researching kiddie crap like this) in the film which starts shooting in Iceland in a few weeks. It’s the first film in a planned trilogy, I guess. It’s also M Night’s last best hope at staying an A list director.