When Scarlett Johansson was cast in the lead role of Ghost in the Shell – a Japanese character in the original manga – the studio probably didn't expect the whitewashing controversy to remain strong right up to release.

But that's what happened, and the movie's box office flop in the US (on a reported $110 million budget) has been heavily publicised as a result, Digital Spy said.

Did the controversy affect its box office earnings? An executive for Paramount, the studio behind Ghost in the Shell, has suggested that may very well be the case.

"We had hopes for better results domestically," Paramount's domestic distribution chief Kyle Davies told CBC. "I think the conversation regarding casting impacted the reviews.

"You've got a move that is very important to the fanboys since it's based on a Japanese anime movie. So you're always trying to thread that needle between honouring the source material and make a movie for a mass audience.

"That's challenging, but clearly the reviews didn't help."

What likely also didn't help was one of the movie's twists, which only served to make the whitewashing more problematic, Digital Spy said.

So, Johansson plays a cyborg with a transplanted brain belonging to a non-Asian woman named Mira Killian. Or so we are led to believe.

By the end, Mira learns that her real identity is actually Motoko Kusanagi (the name of the character in the original manga), and she reunites with her Japanese birth mother.

That's not a good look, and Johansson has since been accused of "lying" about the whitewashing controversy, Digital Spy said.