The Ghostbusters Franchise

I fail to see how the hatred for that movie wasn't rooted in sheer misogyny. No other reboot of a classic movie has ever met this much level of hostility. People saw through the whole "I'm tired of reboots" facade when they go in line for every other reboot out there.

Personally, I found the 2016 trailers to not be funny, which isn't a good first impression.

But Ghostbusters isn't something you could easily reboot like with Batman or Superman. There is an explicit identity associated with Ghostbusters that requires a proper passing the torch moment.

The Force Awakens, for example, as a lot of good will from the general audience, to the point that it was, at the time, very easy to single out who's being misogynistic in their negative ranting. And the key to that is the fact JJ Abrams used a lot of OT nostalgia like with Han Solo to ease the idea of passing the torch to the new generation that is Rey, Finn and Poe. It wasn't until The Last Jedi and especially The Rise of Skywalker that people started to catch on that the OT nostalgia had no payoff that the good will wore off.

Ghostbusters 2016 was an unashamed reboot, with marketing falsely implying that it's connected to the original Ghostbusters. That was a marketing recipe for disaster, and this made absolutely difficult to discuss about the film at all, because misogyny and legit critique are blurred into a blender.

Edited by Shadao on Nov 29th 2021 at 2:31:06 AM

The remake is So Okay, It's Average. It has its highlights, like the villain and the climax in Times Square. Kate McKinnon, Leslie Jones, Chris Hemsworth and Neil Casey were on-point, and it has the best effects in the franchise, possibly including Afterlife. The problem is that the script is dopey, with an overreliance on vulgar humor (puke jokes, queef jokes, etc), that really terrible "black thang or lady thang" that was in all the trailers, and the simple fact that Kristen Wiig and Melissa McCarthy were totally phoning it in. We know they're both funny when they want to be. If McCarthy had brought half the energy of something like Spy to Ghostbusters, she could've saved the whole thing.

It's also worth considering that the director's cut is a million times better than the theatrical cut.

Edited by ThriceCharming on Nov 29th 2021 at 4:24:56 AM

There were plenty of people who disliked the 2016 film due to seeing it as both as cashgrab and just not finding its jokes funny, I've seen women say they disliked the movie for these reasons. It's just that many of them were drowned out by the misogynists.

Edited by Kaiseror on Nov 29th 2021 at 5:25:06 AM

The 2016 movie was attacked via misogyny and the manosphere like the Controversy that Shall Not Be Named TM.

Nevertheless, it was a terrible movie. The extremely talented actresses had an utterly horrible script that was neither funny nor scary and a Ghostbuster movie should be both.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Nov 29th 2021 at 8:49:51 AM

I mainly remember a whole lot of people saying they thought the movie looked like shit, and Sony and Feig fired back with "you're just misogynists, shut up."

That was the core deal, whatever bad faith complaints there was it became "you didn't like it, you must be sexist" which is a completely useless argument to have. But there it went.

I don't think Ghostbusters is supposed to be scary. Like, at all. It's 100% comedy. The only vaguely spooky bit in the whole franchise is Dana being grabbed by the chair hands. I didn't think the remake was very funny either, but complaining that it isn't scary is unfair imho.

Eh, The Devil Dogs, Librarian freak out, and a few other scenes from 2 like the baby kidnapping are actually creepy. The mythology of the setting was also coherent enough to be a decent cartoon and adventure universe.

It's not very scary but there are some legitimately threatening things in-universe.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Nov 30th 2021 at 4:29:02 AM

Just saw it. Thought it was pretty good, 8 or 9 out of 10, maybe more as my thoughts settle. More in depth, spoilery reactions coming.

One thing I'll note that's non spoilery, though, is that the movie begins with opening credits that include a specific substudio of Paramount dedicated specifically to Ghostbusters content. Which is big. That means they've got plans. They might even end up going multimedia with this.

@Ghostbusters being scary.

Yes. Ghostbusters is a Defanged Horrors series, but it doesn't approach Defanged Horror from the same direction as something like - say - the Addams Family, where the core idea is that the things that seem scary are actually funny. The core idea of Ghostbusters is that scary things happen, but the audience knows its okay because eventually these cool guys are going to come around and kick the scary things' ass.

Hypothetically taking the scary out of Ghostbusters would take away one of the things that makes it unique, and would likely just turn into a generic action story.

Edited by KnownUnknown on Nov 30th 2021 at 4:21:19 AM

The Addams Family is a good contrast. It's not scary to the audience because to the family the horror is a mundane part of their life and that makes it funny when others get scared. Ghostbusters is Lovecraft Lite, while the supernatural can be funny (like Slimmer getting Peter) there are scenes in isolation that would not be out of place in Poltergeist, The Shining or The Ring. I know several people traumatized as kids from the hands coming out of the chair.

Yeah, part of the thing is that Gozer and Vigo are legitimately threatening.

Sadly, 2016 never quite had that feel with its villain.

He was more mundane threatening. Sure, he wasn't some eldritch abomination (at first) but he was essentially something along the lines of a dude who walks into a bank and starts shooting up the place, only with ghosts. Someone who just hates people so much that he snaps and decides to kill as many as possible.

Like, remove the more supernatural elements, and you could see this guy easily in real life.

I agree. Rowan was a different kind of Ghostbusters villain, one that makes sense in-universe but isn't just another Cthulhu. That's why he's one of the best parts of the remake.

I don't know if you stuck around for the post-credits stinger, but they strongly imply that strange things are happening in New York again. I'd be happy enough if Afterlife was the end of the series, but I agree that Paramount probably has bigger plans.

I did, but they wouldn't make a whole substudio for just a sequel. That's for, like, if you've got a lot of projects lined up.

The studio in question, Ghost Corps, also produced the 2016 film.

Perhaps more importantly, it has nothing to do with Paramount because Paramount has absolutely nothing to do with these movies.

Ghost Corps is a division of Columbia, and Columbia is in turn a division of Sony Pictures.

Dammit, I knew that!

Say, anyone else find it amusing that, even though Gozer manifesting as the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man was basically a bizarre accident, she's apparently retained some sort of psychic connection to Stay-Puft Marshmallows that allows her to animate them to do her bidding even when sealed?

Who knows, maybe Gozer just likes marshmallows.

She just doesn't understand humans very well and is legitimately under the impression that we are terrified of marshmallows.

Edited by jakobitis on Jan 22nd 2022 at 12:15:22 PM

Finally managed to watch this.

Liked it. I've never hated the 2016 movie (I kinda just felt nothing, but I thought it had good ideas), but this does in fact blow it out of the water.

Looking forward to adding the Blu-ray to my collection on February 1st.

Re: Stay Puft, what kind of power did Gozer actually have prior to being fully resurrected? Was s/he causing the mini-Pufts, or was that the work of Vinz Clortho and/or Zuul?

Tangentially related, but I recently rewatched Key & Peele and I just want to say that the "Vincent Clortho Public School of Magic" is an absolutely brilliant name and I wish I'd thought of it first.

I almost forgot.

Do we think the reason that the second attempt at Crossing The Streams failed because Egon wasn't there to add some extra power, or simply because Gozer was ready for it this time being in it's normal body as opposed to being Stay Puff?

Then again, they didn't cross the streams on Gozer directly. Just the gate that let Gozer in. So who knows?

I don't think you need to have an explicit answer there as there could be a lot of factors working behind the scenes that only a magical physicist like Egon or a seasoned Dungeons and Dragons Gamemaster could figure out.

If I had to guess I'd say that Gozer's awakening in New York was the A plan for a reason and they blew a lot of their energy summoning the Traveler, who Gozer isn't assuming a form of this time.

Gozer being a god is still able to deal with the stream crossing but not having their power divided a couple of thousand times.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Jan 31st 2022 at 11:29:36 AM

Saw the movie yesterday, liked it. Never caught the 2016 reboot so I can't really compare the two. However it was probably the best "nostalgia driven distant sequel/soft remake" I've seen in a long time.

It understood where it could be the same, and where it had to be different. Where nostalgia would do the most good and where it would hit.

And while I'm sure some would find it crass to digitally recreate a dead actor as an actual ghost, but I feel like this particular franchise can do it if it's handled in the right way, which I believe it was.

And I got to hand it to Stay Puff. A lot of companies would probably opt to rebrand after their corporate mascot was used by an evil god in an attempt to destroy the world, but they stay true to their name and I can respect that.