An all-female reboot of Ghostbusters is to be released in theaters next month amid a backlash by Internet users.
The film’s first trailer has become the most “disliked” in YouTube history, with almost 900,000 negative votes, while director Paul Feig and his cast have been bombarded with death threats and misogyny on social media.
“This garbage was made to make Feminazis happy,” one Twitter user said.
Photo: AP
Feig, who has made his name directing female stars in hits such as Bridesmaids, was responsible for bringing on board Melissa McCarthy, Kate McKinnon, , Leslie Jones and Kristen Wiig for the new version of the 32-year-old, all-male original movie.
“I’ve been hit with some of the worst misogynistic stuff you’ve ever seen in your life over the last two years,” he told a recent producers’ conference at Sony Pictures headquarters in southern California. “The onslaught that came in was just so chilling.”
The Woman and Hollywood blog said there was a similar reaction after the producers of Star Wars cast female leads in the latest installment and the upcoming Rogue One.
“We are struggling every day to get the word out against that bias. We still get called in the press a ‘chick flick’ constantly,” Feig said. “We’re never referred to without the words ‘all-female Ghostbusters,’ which makes me crazy.”
“You never talk about the ‘all-male Expendables,’” he said, referring to the Sylvester Stallone-led action series.
The backlash against the new Ghostbusters demonstrates how deeply ingrained the idea remains that big-budget, mainstream movies are “the province of males,” said Martha Lauzen of San Diego State University’s Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film.
“Traditionally, they have featured males and been made by males, with a young male audience in mind,” she said.
“Further, the majority of critics reviewing these films have been male,” she said. “Making a reboot of one of these films with a mostly female cast violates this group’s sense that this public space belongs to them.”
Women comprised 9 percent of directors and 11 percent of writers working on the top 250 US-grossing films last year, Lauzen’s annual Celluloid Ceiling study showed.
There are also fewer female characters on screen. Of 11,306 speaking characters in film and television in 2014 analyzed by the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, two-thirds were male overall and almost three-quarters in feature films.
However, the figures suggest the industry is shooting itself in the foot.
Female-led films grossed 3.3 percent more than movies with male protagonists in 2014, said Stacey Smith, director of the university’s Media, Diversity, and Social Change Initiative.
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