Actor David Oyelowo Admits Disney Was Only Interested Superficially In His ‘Rocketeer’ Because Of George Floyd, BLM, And DEI
Hollywood’s love affair with race and gender-swapped characters might not be slowing in actuality, but it might have given up on an IP it is being lobbied to tinker with. Selma actor David Oyelowo wanted to give Disney cult classic The Rocketeer an overdue sequel, and still does, even though development on it has stalled.
Oyelowo was developing the film, The Return of The Rocketeer, with the studio for Disney+. A semi-sequel, and possibly a quasi-reboot, of the 1991 movie, the rocket would have resurfaced and fallen into the possession of a retired Tuskegee airman. The project was announced in 2021 but has seen little headway in the last four years.
Oyelowo, who was also working on an adaptation of the children’s book Onyeka And The Academy Of The Sun, told The LA Times recently that the reason Onyeka and The Rocketeer became slow-to-no-go is that Hollywood and Disney aren’t really as committed to DEI as they let on. “Onyeka is an absolute bull’s-eye for what we are looking to make, but it is also symptomatic of the challenge we have,” he began.
“We gained traction with that project in the wake of the George Floyd murder and in a moment where there was a cultural correction and people seemed to want to do better. But now we’re in a moment where it’s evident that a lot of that was performative and not bone-deep. Projects like that suddenly become challenged. Onyeka being one, Return Of The Rocketeer at Disney being another,” he continued.
President Trump made rolling back DEI a mission of his second term. Undeterred, Oyelowo wishes to keep on “normalizing the marginalized” through his production company, which produces Apple TV’s Government Cheese. “Attack on DEI or not, we’ve been doing it before there was all this energy around it, and we will be doing it after,” he says.
Reading this, a lot of you are going to be glad Oyelowo’s Rocketeer won’t be going anywhere near changing (or tarnishing) what you love about the original. We here, meanwhile, aren’t too shocked at this news when Disney is prone to throwing money around and announcing things, such as with Star Wars, that never get made.
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