In possibly the worst marketing campaign in cinematic history, the cast and crew of the Ghostbusters reboot attempted to use divisive politically-charged claims of misogyny and racism to dehumanize those who criticized the film, and claim that the film represented the fight for female and race equality against systemic oppression.
However, despite these dehumanizing tactics ultimately failing, resulting a karmically-just flop that couldn't even recoup half of its budget (as insulting, dehumanizing, and generalizing the customers you intend to buy your product tends to lead said customers to not buy the product), there may be an even worse, more painful irony for Feig and the cast who possibly put their careers on the line to defend the films supposed egalitarian message.....
Amy Pascal is the architect behind Ghostbusters 2016, an immensely underperforming flop that may be costly for their studio than the infamous Costner flop Waterworld. The story behind the films development is a tale of arrogance, ignorance, selfishness, and worst of all hypocrisy.
Let's begin with the coerced removal of Ivan Reitman from the production. Reitman (along with Dan Akroyd and Harold Ramis) is essentially the co-creator of Ghostbusters, and for years was anticipating and writing scripts for a third Ghostbusters film, which he essentially held the rights for. However, upon choosing to reboot Ghostbusters, Amy Pascal chose to scrap his input entirely, and as contracts stated that GB could not have another film without his permission, she used the threat of bureaucratic litigation to force him to allow the reboot and remove any creative input he could have on the reboot ("aggressive litigation" was apparently also used to force Bill Murray to return)
Pascal was seemingly determined to turn the franchise into a female-oriented property, hiring Paul Feig, known for his successful female-led comedies, especially the film Bridesmaids, which was considered to be the"female Hangover" in terms of critical and financial success, as well as his near-misandrist feminism due to childhood bullying. Pascal and Feig conspired to entirely alter the appeal of the franchise to make it female-oriented, and decided an all female cast would better serve their pro-female message than a team with both genders, as Reitman had planned.
To give you an example of exactly how stupid a decision this was to fire Reitman and abandon his original vision and hire Feig and alter the appeal of the franchise, let's look at two recent reboots, one of which was a massive hit, the other, a massive flop.
Mad Max: Fury Road was a reboot helmed by George Miller, the original creator of the franchise. Rather than interfere with his vision, which was obviously the appeal of the franchise, WB allowed Miller to continue his vision of the Mad Max world, and due to supplying the vision that made the franchise successful in the first place, Fury Road became a critical and financial juggernaut.
Fan4stic was a reboot helmed by Josh Trank, a young director with one successful film who had absolutely no respect for the original Fantastic Four source material. Trank attempted to alter the appeal of the franchise from being light-hearted sci-fi adventure to dark depressing body horror, a move that led to a critical and financial failure for Fox.
Under Reitman, 2016 Ghostbusters would have surely been a Fury Road, earning back possibly triple its budget, but instead it was helmed under Feig and thus became a Fan4stic, not even earning back half of its budget.
As stated, Pascal attempted to alter the appeal of the franchise to make it more female oriented, but as Fury Road and The Force Awakens showed, women can be major characters in a successful reboot. The key to this however is to be all-inclusive with both women and men, which Pascal and Feig failed to realize when they decided to alienate male viewers with an all female team and no competent men in the entire film, thus appearing to be less about egalitarianism and more about misandry.
Consider that Paul Feig stated that the strong female characters will inspire young girls. Considering that all men in the film are stupid or villainous, how is this film supposed to inspire young boys? This is one of the many reasons the film is widely considered to be misandrist despite its filmmakers claims of egalitarianism.
But that leads into the ultimate hypocrisy. Throughout the production and marketing of the film, Paul Feig, the cast, and Sony-proxy journalist sites, accused anybody who criticized the film to be either misogynist against the female cast of racist against Leslie Jones. Perhaps the most despicable example of this were the petty unwarranted vicious attacks on AVGN, whose objective criticisms of the trailer were met with scathing claims of misogyny.
Other examples of the dehumanization and accusations of misogyny and racism of the film's detractors by the cast and crew during production include Mellisa McCarthy insinuating that detractors were basement dwelling losers, Kristen Wig insinuating that detractors were mentally unstable, Kate McKinnon insinuating that detractors had "mommy issues", and of course, the infamous Twitter war in which Leslie Jones insinuated that detractors were racist misogynists. And let's not forget director Paul Feig insinuating that detractors were asshole geeks.
While the damage of these insults is clearly reflected in the films terrible box office and forever stained reputations of the film's director and cast, the damage may be even worse when one realizes that the entire reason for the film's existence is based on a lie.
Let's talk about Amy Pascal. As stated, she is the mastermind of the misandrist "pro-gender/race equality" 2016 Ghostbusters. She is also a horrific misogynist racist.
Back when Sony was hacked, which led to Pascal's demotion and eventually firing, Pascal was revealed to be a racist who gleefully insulted African Americans, stating that she believed Obama would be a "fan of Django". Even worse however, she was proven to be a misogynist who purposefully paid actresses less than actors and kept them ignorant of the wage gap. After Pascal's demotion, Charlize Theron used this knowledge to get equal pay for the Huntsman films.
So that means that this films entire conception and promotion was a lie. Did supposed women's-rights supporter Paul Feig know of Pascal's misogynist business tactics. Did Mellisa McCarthy, or Wiig or McKinnon, know that by promoting Ghostbusters as anti-misogynist, they were actually promoting a film masterminded by a misogynist? When Leslie Jones got into her Twitter war attacking fans with claims of racism, did she know that the film she was defending was spearheaded by a racist?
This revelation of Pascal's racism and misogyny makes the film's unethical conception and marketing campaign not only worthless (actually costly considering it will lose half its budget) offensive, and arguably misandrist, but now also hypocritical. This makes Feig and the cast look like complete morons who are completely ignorant at best and unethically deceptive at worst.
The implications of this on the reputation of the film and it's cast/director is absolutely humiliating. Let's hope the next reboot director and cast choose to honor the source material and fans (i.e. customers), rather than demean them with (embarrassingly hypocritical) insults.
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