Elizabeth Taylor once played Cleopatra in one of the most iconic roles in her legendary career. The movie was a box office smash and got great critical reviews, despite Taylor being a white woman. Audiences didn’t care; they just wanted to be entertained.
Of course, that was an era without political correctness and the virtue-signaling social justice warriors that abound today. Now, if you dare cast a white person or a non-fat person in a role that isn’t specifically made for a white or thin person, you have committed a mortal sin.
Unfortunately, the left doesn’t apply the same rules to both sides. We now have a black, red-headed Little Mermaid, an Asian Velma, and a black Shaggy from the animated Scooby-Doo disaster. While these shows have been largely critically panned and unsuccessful, none have hit the depths of the new Netflix documentary “Queen Cleopatra.” Why? The producers decided to make Cleopatra black, and she most decidedly wasn’t. Since what goes around comes around, audiences and critics alike haven’t been kind to the race-baiting casting choice. The Daily Wire said:
Netflix’s new documentary “Queen Cleopatra” has drawn controversy and “blackwashing” claims after Adele James, a black actress, was cast in the lead role. And yes, in fact, historical records show Cleopatra she wasn’t black, but Macedonian-Greek.
The documentary, part of the African Queens series, explores the rise and fall of the last pharaoh of Egypt and was released on May 10. But it’s the dismal ratings that are making headlines.
Usually documentary type programming is bulletproof and ratings gold. There is so much fascination with the past and certain time periods that a good doc will draw big ratings. Not this time.
Egyptian Network To Make Its Own Cleopatra Doc Following Outrage Over Black Actress Cast In Lead Role On Netflix https://t.co/kYx5yAalic pic.twitter.com/wd0IXnHb3A
— Daily Wire News (@DailyWireNews) May 11, 2023
The documentary currently has a 2% audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes, which Forbes says is the lowest in history.
The “average Tomatometer,” which calculates how many critics rate it favorably, stands at 10%.
Those are historically low numbers that were once thought impossible. How can literally everyone universally hate something? It turns out that when you blatantly virtue signal and turn the most well-known Queen in history into a “melanated” sister, people might actually draw the line. After all, we aren’t talking about Elizabeth Taylor, and it isn’t 1963. In fact, this is the climate the left has created, coming back to devour their own.
The creator of the series, Tina Gharvi, has tried to save the sinking ship:
“Why shouldn’t Cleopatra be a melanated sister? And why do some people need Cleopatra to be white? Her proximity to whiteness seems to give her value, and for some Egyptians it seems to really matter. After much hand-wringing and countless auditions, we found in Adele James an actor who could convey not only Cleopatra’s beauty, but also her strength. What the historians can confirm is that it is more likely that Cleopatra looked like Adele than Elizabeth Taylor ever did.”
Cleopatra can’t be “melanated” for the same reason the left got big mad at Brendan Fraser in a fat suit for “The Whale,” and they got pissed at Bryan Cranston in a wheelchair for the 2017 movie “The Upside.” Turns out there just aren’t a lot of super fat or quadriplegic actors to fit those roles, but that wasn’t good enough for the left. Now, if audience reviews are any indication, those chickens are coming home to roost.
“I’m a huge history buff and I love documentaries depicting the past lives of historical figures. That being said, I have no idea what this is. It’s not a documentary depicting the life of Cleopatra. It’s a race baiting Netflix show that tells its audience that if you can’t get on board with this retelling of how we see the history of Queen Cleopatra, then you’re racist. End of story,” one amateur reviewer wrote.
“A ‘documentary’ that has about as much historical accuracy as John Wayne playing Genghis Khan back in 1956. Cleopatra was a Macedonian Greek. If you want her to be Black, fine create a historic fiction series. Queen Hatshepsut or Queen Nefertiti would have been a much better person to cover if you wanted to take the Black female empowerment narrative,” another wrote.
There are hundreds of reviews exactly like these. Certainly, the producers could have found an actress that more accurately portrayed the famous Queen. Will the lesson be learned moving forward? That remains to be seen, but I’m not hopeful.
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