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You can't play Morten Harket's part - you're not Norwegian.

In all seriousness, we know perfectly well why ScarJo was cast. The producers wanted a bankable star in the lead role. There simply aren't any female Japanese actors with Star-power equal to Scarlett's in the west.
That's the bottom line, rightly or wrongly. The justification that the main character is in a robot body and therefore that race is less important seems like a reasonable compromise and in-universe explanation to me. At least they've cast Asian actors in other roles and have kept Japan as the setting.

^Yeah but that's just like...your opinion man.

That second GITS poster at least says 'sci-fi'.

The Lucy poster, while being a bit mundane at least gives you loads of information about the film. It's an action thriller, it explains part of the premise and it lets you know the pedigree of the director.

Vanquish is one of my favourites - love that game. I find it hard to believe that there isn't more of a market for that brand of fast paced, arcadey action.

There's a good chance that some of this material will be reprinted around the GOTG 2 film release.

...as I was saying - I find it interesting that this film's poor performance is being blamed on the whitewashing controversy when, to me, it seems that the marketing of the film has been completely bungled.

I feel like I'm part of the target demographic for the film. A fan of sci-fi and action films and a casual cinema-goer. My main impressions of this film are the above poster and an image of Scarlett running towards the camera in what looks like a chameleon-esque body suit. That's it.
I have a vague recollection of seeing the anime sometime in the 90s and thinking it was a bit boring. Nonetheless I'm sure with a bit of effort I could have been persuaded to see a slick modern sci-fi action flick starring Scarlett Johansen.

The whitewashing thing is neither here nor there to me. I've been shown nothing to make me want to see the film. 

Well Ghost in the Shell has flopped at the box office.
There's loads of stuff on social media blaming the flop on the 'whitewashing' controversy, which I'm finding quite interesting. I almost posted on here a couple of weeks ago to comment on the film's poster which seems to be all around town at the moment.
It's this one:


To me this poster completely fails at its job. It tells you absolutely nothing about the film other than that it exists. It doesn't even clearly define the genre. Surely the only people who are going to be interested after seeing this are those already familiar with the source material or those who'll go and see anything starring Scarlett Johansen.

More on this later - I need to go to work...

I've enjoyed what I've read of Dan Slot's Spider-Man. Superior is well worth checking out.
i don't find the Christophe Yost stuff anywhere near as good though.

Yeah,taken as whole is terribly broad definition.Combined Delano-Ennis run is some of the best comics ever.Warren Ellis also had a great(but sadly too short) run.Azzarelo did an okay job.But you also had Paul Jenkins who managed to write 50 issues without actually contributing anything.Dear Grud,there are stereotypes,and then there are Rich the Punk and Slobodan(Funny foreigner/Serbian war criminal).

Fair enough, but I think it still works as an example of a comic that can run long term with an ever changing creative team to a monthly schedule and still offer high-quality entertainment - all without the main character ever feeling 'played-out'.

Another example of a series getting it right is Hellblazer. 300 monthly issues, a whole host of different writers and artists yet, taken as a whole, a fantastic body of work.
I'm still gutted that they cancelled it!

I know JC is a great character but surely there's no reason that Batman, Superman, Spider-man, Wonder Woman etc couldn't enjoy similarly high-quality runs?

We can complain, with justification, about the curses of the crossover/reboot/continuity rut, but at the same time, some of these properties have had 25-100 pages of comic a month for half a century. Perhaps the Big 2's Big Names are just played out? Imagine if Flesh (for example) had run continuously in over 2000 progs now?  Or even less contentious strips like Strontium Dog or Zenith, running non-stop for 40 years? Dredd has managed it, just about, but that's one exceptional highly flexible strip, and even that has had just share of grim doldrums.

Maybe no property/character/cash cow can be expected to run and remain popular  indefinitely?

This is the crux of it really.
Add to this the complications of a shared universe and a need to return to the status quo and you can see how quality would suffer.

Having said that, there's nothing necessarily wrong with the ideas/premises behind most of the stories, it's just the execution.
If I use The Punisher as an example - the best stories (basically the Ennis, Aaron and Dixon stuff) don't have any particularly original ideas in them. They just get the character and the tone right. There's no reason, with a decent editor and a decent talent pool, that stories of Frank Castle's antics shouldn't continue at that level of quality indefinitely.

There's a lot of headline chasing going on at the Big 2.They keep putting out these big continuity-quaking events, get loads of headlines, see a brief sales spike and then a couple of years late the same thing happens  to diminishing returns.
I'd be interested to see how the TPB lines sell. Almost everything gets collected these days but I bet the big sellers are still the old favourites - The Killing Joke, Arkham Asylum, Dark Knight, Watchmen etc.

Does anyone know what the most profitable current ongoing title is? The Walking Dead maybe?

The 32X was worth it just for Virtua Racing Deluxe and Star Wars Arcade!

Daddy/Daughter date tonight, so I took Small Rocka to Beauty & The Beast. Mocketh all ye like, fellow squaxx, but both of us absolutely loved it. Kinda like Les Mis without the relentless misery (and lot more Stockholm Syndrome). Emma Watson nailing her role and the whole cast having a ball.
Say what you like about Disney, but when they deliver a great family film, they do it properly.

Good for you. I have lots of goodwill towards the animated version ((always really liked the design of the beast).