Molly's Game

Lead matches the real white Molly Bloom; the male-heavy poker world looks period- and setting-plausible. Main visible diversity beat is inventing co-lead lawyer Charlie Jaffey and casting Idris Elba as the principled, high-competence counsel/moral center rather than adapting Bloom’s real (white) attorney—noticeable star casting, not a full “one of each” ensemble or race-swapped historical figure.

Sorkin monologues and courtroom/judgment beats hit woman-in-a-man’s-world, male entitlement, and a judge-style contrast between Molly’s gambling and bigger Wall Street wrongdoing. Not constant identity lectures, but progressive power-and-gender talk is clear in patches.

Core narrative is still a crime/ambition biopic and father–daughter drama, yet gender power (woman running and surviving elite male poker) is a major structural and promotional theme—framed as female empowerment and #MeToo-adjacent “patriarchy/abuse of power,” which many viewers will clock without it becoming a race/queer manifesto.

Targets rich-male entitlement, bullying “boys’ club” culture, and hedge-fund/Wall Street corruption versus Molly’s comparatively smaller federal case. Ordinary crime-drama greed satire plus modern gender-power framing of traditional male status games; not a broad anti-Christian or full systemic-identity sermon.

Driven mainly by writer-director Aaron Sorkin’s classical progressive/liberal brand (West Wing–style idealism, post-2016 resistance letter, progressive courtroom/history projects), which aligns with this film’s mild empowerment and institutional-critique tone more than hard DEI activism. Supporting creatives are mostly commercial producers; casting director Francine Maisler sits in a moderate industry-inclusion band.