Few entertainment topics generate more heat and less measurement than the recasting of a character race or gender away from an established source. WhatSphere tracks this directly. For any adaptation, the data records a race swap or gender swap when a character depicted one way in the source material is portrayed another way on screen, and flags a critical swap when that character is central to the story rather than a background role. This is a descriptive count, not a judgment: the field says a change occurred, nothing about whether it worked, why it was made, or how audiences received it.
With the definition fixed, the scale is the story.
The headline numbers
Of the 4,033 titles with completed cast demographics, exactly 14 record any race swap at all. Those 14 titles account for 31 individual race swaps in total. Gender swaps are rarer still: 2 titles, 2 swaps, across the entire catalog. In proportional terms, fewer than four titles in a thousand register a single swap of either kind. Whatever one expects walking in, the dataset does not describe a pervasive, industry-wide practice. It describes a small, identifiable set of cases.
One framing caveat sharpens rather than softens this. Only an adaptation of established source material can register a swap at all; an original screenplay has no prior depiction to diverge from. So the fair denominator is the 228 adaptations in the catalog, not all 4,033 titles. Even measured against that smaller base, swaps remain the exception rather than the rule.
Where they cluster
The swaps that do exist are concentrated in time and in type. They appear almost entirely in high-profile adaptations and remakes released between 2019 and 2023, with a clear peak in 2023. Earlier years are mostly empty; 2024 and the partial 2025 record none so far.
The titles that drive the count
| Title | Year | Race swaps | Critical | Gender swaps |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Percy Jackson and the Olympians | 2023 | 5 | 3 | 0 |
| The Witcher | 2019 | 5 | 3 | 0 |
| The Little Mermaid | 2023 | 4 | 1 | 0 |
| Velma | 2023 | 3 | 3 | 0 |
| His Dark Materials | 2019 | 2 | 0 | 0 |
| House of the Dragon | 2022 | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| Dune | 2021 | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse | 2018 | 0 | 0 | 1 |
A short list of recent adaptations, several of them fantasy or remakes of animated classics, accounts for most of the total. The same handful of titles that dominate public conversation also dominate the data, which is itself a finding: the perception of frequency is driven by a small number of prominent cases, not by volume.
Gender swaps are vanishingly rare
The two recorded gender swaps deserve emphasis precisely because the number is so low. One appears in Dune and one in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. That is the entire gender-swap record in a catalog of thousands of titles. Any general claim about gender swapping as a trend runs immediately into a sample of two.
What the count can and cannot support
Used honestly, this data settles a factual question and leaves the contested ones open. It can tell you how many swaps the catalog records, which titles they appear in, and when. It cannot tell you whether a given change improved or harmed a story, what the creators intended, or how viewers felt, because none of those are what the field measures. And the numbers are small enough that they should be cited as counts, not rates: with 31 race swaps and 2 gender swaps total, a single newly scored adaptation can move the picture. The responsible reading is the literal one. Swaps happen, they are documented title by title, and across the catalog as a whole they are uncommon.
Central characters and where the swaps live
Not every recorded swap carries the same narrative weight, and the catalog marks the difference. Several of the swap-heavy titles involve central rather than background characters: Percy Jackson and the Olympians, The Witcher, and Velma each record three critical swaps, meaning the changed characters are core to the story rather than incidental. Others, like His Dark Materials, record swaps that the data flags as non-central. The distinction is the difference between a recasting that reshapes a protagonist and one that adjusts an ensemble, and it is exactly the kind of detail that gets flattened when swaps are discussed as a single undifferentiated category.
Type also concentrates the count. The titles driving the totals are overwhelmingly fantasy adaptations and remakes of well-known animated or illustrated source material, the categories where a fixed prior depiction makes any change conspicuous. That is partly a measurement artifact: the more iconic and specific the source, the easier a swap is to identify and record. It also means the picture is genuinely incomplete and will move as the catalog grows. With 2024 and early 2025 recording none so far, and with only 228 adaptations scored in total, a single major adaptation could meaningfully shift the counts in either direction. The honest summary remains the literal one: the swaps that exist are documented title by title, they cluster in a recent handful of high-profile adaptations, and across the catalog as a whole they are scarce.
