Pretty much what happened with Wonder Woman as well. They released the trailer and most people were like "Eh.." and then they amplified the voices of the roomful of MRA/Red pill idiots talking about how women shouldn't have civil rights and turned into "IT'S YOUR DUTY TO SEE THIS MOVIE TO SHOW THEM!! EAT THIS CORPORATE FILM PRODUCT TO CELEBRATE YOUR INDEPENDENCE AND STRENGTH!! ALSO ALSO SOMETHING SOMETHING TRUMP!"

And dumb people bought into it and patted themselves on the back for seeing a comic book movie as a social justice act, when there are literally serious films made by women with women coming out all the time that none of these people care about because there are not pop culture references or 'splosions.

I dunno, Stanley. I thought Wonder Woman was pretty good.

Counterpoint: Wonder Woman was an enjoyable blockbuster that my wife felt more invested in than Iron Man 4 because, yes, it had a female lead, and it provided a pleasant alternative to listening to our toddler scream and throw food for two hours.

If that last part sounds like a given, you haven't seen Batman v Superman.

I'm sure WW was fine, and I'm not saying the film itself is automatically bad because of how it was marketed. I'm saying the marketing was problematic as was the overall social reaction. I think people can say "there are positive things about WW" while also being intellectually honest that it also played up the fake-y "internet sexists don't want you to see this" nonsense that attempt to make it look like some legion of neckbearded idiots was fighting some war against the film or something, when in reality it was just the usual internet trolls that do this over virtually everything. Mike made a good point in the GB review that Suicide Squad, though a terrible movie, had a diverse, multi-ethnic cast, but you notice it didn't become a social justice thing because WB's marketing didn't ring that Pavlov's bell for the internet. There was a surprising amount of dumb, racist backlash when it was announced that Human Torch would be black in the new F4 movie, yet again, the clarion call of that movie was not "GO SEE IT TO FIGHT RACISM" because it wasn't marketed like that.

So a company that can only very rarely make a movie that isn't incompetent shit can run a masterful psy ops media campaign and never get outed?

Or there are a ton of misogynists and trump voters on the internet who get way too much attention?

A lot of the debate about Sony has been covered before. For example, here:

http://www.poetv.com/video.php?vid=154827

As I pointed out there, the bitching started as soon as the all-female cast was announced, and all over the Internet. Now, either Sony was everywhere all at once typing misogynistic comments long before there was anything to criticize except the vaginas, or else the pushback against this movie has an awful lot to do with misogyny.

Which does not mean there aren't legitimate complaints to make; one valid criticism is that the movie is too heavy on riffing and too light on well-written script. Another valid point: of course the black woman is the loud over-the-top character, without much to counter the stereotype. See? Legitimate criticisms -- but they're based on the finished product. As opposed to what they were saying when the cast was announced:

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/new-all-female-gh ostbusters-cast-767610

---

"ROFL...Sony has officially gone full retard."

"Yeah, 1-2 females but all of them? i just dont see it. As of right now like i said, NO NO NO NO NO, but i been shocked before!"

"You got it. Epic FAIL. Whole idea makes me cringe..."

"Perhaps you have never heard of Christopher Hitchens. His argument as to why female comedian's are just not as funny as male comedian's comes from a scientific and evolutionary point of view. I strongly urge you to investigate, check YouTube. Chris wasn't sexist in any way, either, he wasn't a feminist but he was most definitely for equal rights and avidly supported the empowerment of women as a cure to global poverty and the violence of Islam ('there is nothing Muslim extremists fear more than a little girl with a book.')"

Wait, some people on the internet are shameless misogynists?

I need to sit down.

It's good that at least a few people are willing to admit that they were duped by the studio and tabloids into defending a shitty movie.

Wait, are Ghostbusters truthers a thing now? Are there actually people who think that Sony would need to FAKE a backlash by redpiller nerdbros, the single most easily outraged group of humans in existence?

Even if Sony had wanted a backlash (which is absurd on its face) they wouldn't need to do a damn thing to cause it. It was an inevitability from the second they decided to make the Ghostbusters women.

Let's just call this what it is: a forgettable movie that has now been enshrined in pop culture history based solely on the fact that a bunch of talking fedoras took its existence as a personal attack. If y'all had shut up about Ghostbusters a year ago, the only thought anyone would give to this movie now would be a brief moment of recognition upon seeing it in the five dollar bin at Wal-Mart. But nope, now it'll show up in thinkpieces and essays for decades to come.

I'm not going to even bother to research whether Sony did a thing. I'll happily spot people that one, because even if Sony did, the fact remains that they generated at most a marginal amount of the dudely online outrage.

Also Wonder Woman was great. I'm not sure where this feminist social justice signaling was in the marketing; all I saw were generic superhero movie posters and trailers. The closest we got was that dustup about the women's only screenings, but that was Alamo Drafthouse's doing, not the studio's.

It's entirely possible that both the world is full of misogynistic CHUDs who flipped their shit at this (and indeed, the fact that this whole thing was a stepping stone to MILO ANDREAS WAGNER's rise to fame is evidence that this world needs to fucking drink bleach)

AND

Sony stepped on their dicks and made a mediocre movie, and their marketing department tried to pull whatever stunts they could.

I find it really hard to believe that the same cosmically inept marketing team that gave Ghostbusters one of the worst trailers in living memory (consisting almost entirely of gags that were cut from the final film for not being funny) would somehow also be Machiavellian geniuses who manipulated all of 4chan into hating their movie. Especially since the outcome was still a box office flop.

There's nothing "genius" about piggybacking on the feminist backlash to the MRA assholes. In fact, it's the height of laziness. Pure Sony.

I'm not sure why you find that hard to believe.

Let's not be too down on Akroyd. One of the reasons that GB worked was because of Akroyd's ideas. All the supernatural pseudoscience & pseudohistory was Akroyd, and that stuff added a surprising amount of versimilitude & depth. In effect, that stuff made the entire world into the straight man, thus allowing each of the 3 white ghostbusters to be wacky in their own way. (I'm not real sure what part Ernie Hudson's character played. I suspect the movie would have worked just fine if he had been cut entirely.)

Plus Akroyd's performance was pretty awesome.

I have to agree, the original "Ghostbusters" is the beneficiary of a lot of hype. Good film yes, God's gift to comedy no.

So here's the thing about the original: the magical week in 1984 where "Ghostbusters" was released concurrently with "Gremlins' launched an entire genre of high concept, effects and design driven horror/comedy that lasted until 1999 when "The Frighteners" was the final entry in the incredibly expansive theme. I'm actually writing a book about it now. The genre is so specifically tied to the late 80s/mid-90s that it defines pop culture of that period. CGI killed the genre because something about the Stan Winston monster factory just can't be fully replicated with CGI. It's defined by goop and lots of it, the last gasp of stop-motion animation, extremely overproduced set design (the set design is my tell to include it in the book or not), and a lower middle class aesthetic, drawn from the influences of EC Comics, Mad magazine, and the Old Dark House trope.

I have been thinking about this specific *subject* a lot for a long time. "Ghostbusters" is great but it's not THE GREATEST. I also think a huge opportunity was lost by not doing the Ghostbusters/Beetlejuice crossover that was discussed at one point in the Hollywood cocktail parties.

Well there you go. The director saying "no" to terrible ideas plays a big part, something Feig seems completely unable to do (either that or pure laziness because just pointing the cameras for 50 minutes and telling them to wing the whole thing is a lot easier).

We're going to pretend the original Ghostbusters wasn't one of the best comedies ever made now? Sheesh, you guys sound ready to join the AFI making terrible comedy lists.

Frighteners was 1996.

Bill Murray in general is the beneficiary of a lot of hype, because, like Bon Jovi or honey garlic chicken wings, he's unextraordinary but agreeable to all. That made him the perfect product for mass consumption and, as the years have ticked on, nostalgic adoration.

He's also been smart enough to avoid major public meltdowns that would drain his legacy bank.

Now we're pretending Bill Murray wasn't a comedic genius at any point?

Forget the terrible improv. The worst part about this movie is the crazy revisionism it's pushing people to. Nobody had ever said Murray was mass market pop culture mush prior this. NOBODY.

You are right about 1996. It's at the far end of the spectrum for what I'm studying so I was a bit off there but it's in my notes correctly.

@Anaxagoras

"thus allowing each of the 3 white ghostbusters to be wacky in their own way. (I'm not real sure what part Ernie Hudson's character played. I suspect the movie would have worked just fine if he had been cut entirely.)"

For what it's worth, Winston was my favorite Ghostbuster simply because he was the only one who wasn't a doctor or had fancy degrees. He showed that even if you didn't go to college you could still have a really cool job like Ghostbusting, which was pretty neat when you're 4 or 5 years old.

Winston is the star of the movie. Everyone else is an asshole. Winston was my favorite.

If anything, this movie really highlights the problems with the reliance some filmmakers have with improvisation.

Some have been touting the improv schtick in GB2016 as one of the movie's strong points but improv/ad-libbing only works great some of the time. But it's very obvious when you're watching bad improv in a film, something where the dialogue and pacing are completely aimless because nobody's actually in charge of making sure all of the individual lines add up to a movie. When someone, deliberately goes for the "let's come up with something and just throw it in" approach, unnecessary improv just stops a movie dead in its tracks. Which is something because the idea of improv is that you are supposed to find game and get to a point quickly. Bad improv has a tendency towards self-indulgence and meandering about.

The pacing is off and scenes just sort of drift into each other. See the obvious bad improv scenes in the Austin Powers movies for another example.

If you're going to improv through a whole move, the scenes are going to miss more often than they hit because in improv chemistry, timing, pacing are even more crucial and it's hard to just edit footage together of a dozen or more actors while maintaining a strong, consistent through line. It takes really skilled actors to hold you through a weak comedic scene where they're trying to come up with stuff on the fly and you can often see them sweat trying. Certainly not the leads of this movie.

Wiig is a mediocre comic talent best reserved for straight man parts, and despite the praise RLM has been giving to Leslie Jones she is on a tier of public access cable quality. Also let me be blunt and say Melissa McCarthy is yet another lame sitcom level-comedienne who should just not be in movies.

McKinnon, from the clips I've seen, is the worst. She just sucks the air out of everything and tries too hard to be 'weird'. It's as if the only direction Feig ever gave her was "Okay Kate, your character's name is Holtzmann, and she's the zaaaany one. She's really 'out there'! Okay, ACTION!"

>>>Some have been touting the improv schtick in GB2016 as one of the movie's strong points but improv/ad-libbing only works great some of the time.

I would put it this way: It's always fun to watch these performers react off of each other. It's only funny part of the time.

The original ghostbusters was bound to be an ALT-RIGHT/MRA classic. That's not Harold Ramis's fault. These things didn't exist back then. The way I remember it, Animal House was like a blast of energy, transcending conventional movie morality. Five years later, Ghostbusters formalized the attitude into a deliberately amoral universe. In his first scene, Peter Venkman is torturing a student test subject with electric shocks, so he can scam a younger student into a sexual encounter in the lab. In the real world, he would be a predatory piece of shit, but the world of Ghostbusters is populated with creepy and ineffectual men: a repilian Dean , a foppish hotel manager with a pocket hankie , a petty vindictive government bureaucrat, an effeminate musician taking a hit off his nasal spray, like a bloodless aristocrat with a snuffbox. Betas and cucks.

The flaw was that an entire movie of pure adlib sucks.

I actually liked McKinnon's character. But that's maybe because I fancy the performer a lot.

She sure has great taste.

...in food! Papa John's is delicious!

To be honest I thought they we're going to do a "cover-up/conspiracy" movie too, play the events from the first two movies off like a promo for a new cartoon or cereal that went wrong. They even they set up the original Ghost Busters' cameos as if they were playing those same characters from the first movie but it never pays off. Maybe if someone sat down to write a script that could of happened but they didn't.

To be fair, from what I can tell the scene with Slimer eating all of the Papa Johns is just a commercial and not like that in the movie, which is fairly typical. I didn't see one ad for Valerian that wasn't a Lexus tie-in, and even best-picture winners like Gladiator had a then-WWF tie-in promo.

Fuk yea I do, but I can't find them on their menu. I know it's complete shit but when you're stoned and starving at 11PM and all the good delivery places have just closed the cheese sticks are pretty awesome. Also if you search for "papa johns" with duckduckgo instead of google the first result is for "Dominos."

It's okay.

Pretty much. I think it's better than "OK", but it's not a comedic masterpiece like RLM is saying.

I did rewatch it not too long ago, and I must say: it has aged pretty well.

This 4th of July I was flipping channels and saw the Blues Brothers performing on PBS for their big 4th concert, still Ackroyd, and now Jim Belushi, which I don't know is better or worse than John Goodman (I love Goodman but EVERYTHING about that casting is wrong, everything) so dancing on a franchise's (or fellow actor's) grave is still a thing for him apparently.

They wanted to call him a member of the mulberry family.

Professors thwart a ghost terrorizing a librarian by using a NES Advantage controller?

nah, the other things. After starting a successful ghost busting business Peter Venkman tries to reconcile with his estranged ex-wife for the sake of their young child who has been possessed the spirte of a Hungarian warlord.

Six of their top ten grossing movies are Spiderman, but then again all the Star Wars besides the new ones make up the majority of 20th Century Fox's top ten. Other than that the first 2 Terminator movies and the first Starship Troopers movie and Seinfeld and that's all. Of course there's Sony Pictures Classic, but looking down the list all I really see that I liked were Henry Fool, Spider and The Lives of Others.

oops I missed Only Lovers Left Alive, it's like what would happen if the Twilight kids read pitchfork and aged ten years but it's still Jarmusch, and none of these "Classics" titles probably matter anyway.

It really shows how many problems Sony has had, it's desperate to make a real franchise from it's IP, something it's been failing at generally. Sony wanted to turn Ghostbusters into a cinematic universe in part because it recently messed up it's Spider-Man cinematic universe and had to limp into a deal with Disney to loan out Spider-Man like a glorified birthday party entertainer.

This points to how massively successful Disney/Marvel has been in this territory, turning its IP into a printing press. All the other studios are green with envy, but their attempts to mimic Marvel keep turning up red ink instead.

It really, really seems like it should be possible to contact some fans of this genre or that, people who have demonstrated an ability to articulate what fans are going to like and why, and then run ideas past them. I can think of a dozen comics bloggers with whom they could have had a conversation like so:

"We want to have Superman and Batman fight."

"Why?"

"Because Batman doesn't trust Superman."

"That's a stupid idea; if you're doing the characters right, Superman is pretty trustworthy and Batman is smart enough to recognize a good man when he sees one."

"But then they won't fight to the death!"

"Wait, to the death?"

"Well yeah, Batman intends to kill Superman. Until he discovers that they both have mothers named 'Martha'."

"Jesus Christ, you're too stupid to understand comic books. Let that sink in."

Or they could, you know, make something new.

No, I don't like things that are new.

I'm not going to bother to watch any new batman coming from WB / DC as Nigeria has already produced a superior batman for all time:

https://youtu.be/z1aevalX77M