Sane and calm discussion of Ghostbusters 2016 -- AN INTERNET MIRACLE!

[JasonPratt]

Yep, was very impressed at this polite, reasonable, careful post-mortem of why the reboot failed. (Not sarcasm either. This guy's film analysis series deserves more attention from me, mental note...)

My one disagreement with the analysis is that I think he's wrong about the film barely trying to be "feminist" (except as a shallow gimmick). Feig and the actors promoted the movie strongly and rather insultingly along that line, and I don't think that was totally a reaction to online trolling. The script characteristics often point that way, too. In that sense I think his analysis of the gimmickry was correct, but that the gimmickry was a lot more extended than he's accounting for; and this landed on the wrong side of the zeitgeist, because too many people were getting tired and annoyed with being force-fed progressiveness. They might have been willing to go along with the conceptual property and the flashyness, even with a weak script, had the film been funny. But too much of the film's comedy was structured to appeal, at best, to the audience in a dividing way -- and even then it doesn't seem to have landed as well on their target audience. But aiming structurally, and in its (more or less unofficial) promotional material for a very particular target audience was a big part of the reason why the film wasn't popular enough to earn its costs back.

I do however agree with him that this wasn't the primary reason the film didn't, overall, earn its expenses back. The property wasn't established enough to draw enough new viewers curious about the establishment of the property, and the fans generally didn't want a reboot -- they wanted continuity, passing on the torch. A choice was made not to pass on the torch, for some reason, and I think the producers realized that they needed something to add some punch to the appeal: thus the choice to design and market the film to an audience they thought they could rely on to come out and support the movie.