In many ways, blockbuster culture is finally getting with the program and catering to an audience that’s changed since the days when it was mostly just white teenagers seeing these movies. The reboot of “Star Wars” was led by John Boyega and Daisy Ridley, the female-driven “Hunger Games” movies were bigger than most blockbusters, and we’re finally getting a more diverse take on superheroes with “Wonder Woman,” “Black Panther” and “Captain Marvel.”
READ MORE: The ‘Ghostbusters’ Face Off Against An Old Enemy In New TV Spots
But any optimism about how the times are changing for the better is tempered slightly by the tantrums thrown by whiny nostalgia babies over the new “Ghostbusters” movie. Since the day it was announced that Paul Feig’s reboot would be female-led, they’re been throwing their proverbial toys out of the proverbial prams, protesting that their upset is nothing to do with sexism (though they were curiously quiet about reboots of films like “Jurassic World,” “Point Break” and “21 Jump Street,” which all remained resolutely dude-friendly.
Whether or not the film turns out to be any good — and Feig’s track record is strong enough that he probably gets the benefit of the doubt until we see it — it’s good to know that the people making the movie are just as baffled by the backlash as we are. In a New York Times interview with the director and his stars (Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, Leslie Jones and Kate McKinnon), Feig calls the fuss “the death throes of the old guard. It makes a smaller minority scream louder, because they’re losing their grip on the cliff.”
Elsewhere, when asked about the haters, Jones replies, semi-jokingly “You mean the people that don’t know it’s a movie?,” while McCarthy responds “I think their childhood was pretty much ruined already. If this broke it, it was pretty fragile to begin with. It is good to remember, it is a tiny, tiny fraction that screams. Normal, healthy people don’t stand outside, saying, ‘You’re ruining my childhood!’ There’s one nut on every corner in every city that does it. But so what? The other 300,000 people in a town aren’t doing that.”
Not a response that’ll endear them to the haters, perhaps, but an inarguably correct one. “I hope hate stops being popular,” McCarthy says later on, while Wiig, palpably fed up, responds to a question about whether the film is a ‘litmus test’ by saying “How many litmus tests do we need? I’ve been hearing this for five years. Sorry, I’m finished.”
We’ll be seeing soon enough if “Ghostbusters,” the 2016 edition is any good — we’ve certainly laughed at the trailers more than once, and with this cast, we’d turn up to see them read the phone book. We’ll find out how they fare in the blockbuster world when the film opens on July 15th.
Uhm… I appreciate your progressive leaning here, I really do, but not everybody that ‘protests’ this is a sexist. There are far too many dislikes on these YouTube trailers for that to be true. The movie just doesn’t look good. I’m holding out for reviews like the rest of you, but I can’t imagine how that footage fits into a good film, regardless of the gender of its lead characters. I was behind this film, I was hyped at the casting news, I was loving the early teaser images as they dribbled out… The trailers squandered all that good will. That reaction doesn’t make me a chauvinist pig. It just makes me a discerning film viewer.
Why does this matter? Well because when you have an agenda to push, it taints your credibility. You’re condemning a straw man group for this while committing the same mistake by giving this thing the benefit of the doubt before it’s even out and quoting heavily from the people behind its promotional campaign. You’ve all but painted yourself into a corner where you have to praise this film because of what is represents, and that’s really going to be ugly if it turns out to be subpar or even bad. It’s best to stay impartial in these things, otherwise you’ll be going to war with your own integrity.