Originally Posted by
Bored at 3:00AM
I think Johns loosened that up substantially during his tenure, but there were still silos up in regard to what could and couldn't be done. I'm sure the old tired ideas of "audience confusion" informed the choice to go with a white dark haired grandpa for Superman more than racism. If Johns didn't have such a strong record in regards to introducing so much diversity into the DCU, I might be more skeptical, but nothing I've heard so far makes me think that Johns is some racist that needed Superman's grandpa to be a white guy because he has issues with black people, which seems to be what they're trying to paint him as.
Being racially insensitive is one thing, but denying people roles because he's racist is simply not supported by the evidence at hand.
By the way, Warner Bros. doesn't need to recast Cyborg. They already did for the Doom Patrol show, to which Johns reportedly called up Fisher to inform him. At first I thought Fisher was exaggerating, but, given what we know now, I can absolutely see how that could easily be viewed as a passive-aggressive move on Johns's part. I don't know if it was, but given the issues that Johns & Fisher had during production, I can't imagine why Johns would want to call up Fisher to tell him that yet another guy is playing Cyborg in live-action.
I suppose it's possible that Johns wanted to make sure that Fisher wasn't going to take it personally, but that feels...unlikely to me.