The post-mortem examination of Paul Feig’s all-female Ghostbusters reboot continues today, only this time, it’s Feig who has weighed in with the latest take.
One year after its theatrical release, Vulture gave the filmmaker a call to discuss his gender-swapping actioner, which had Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, Kate McKinnon and Leslie Jones suit up as those four famous ‘Busters: Zeddemore, Venkman, Stantz, and Spengler.
But for all of its lofty ambitions, Ghostbusters proved to be one of the more high-profile flops of 2016, and wound up costing Sony upwards of $70 million when accounting for marketing and distribution. Plus, as Dan Aykroyd so rightly says, the film wasn’t exactly cheap to make, what with all that lavish CGI.
For Feig, though, Ghostbusters will forever haunt him as “a great regret in [his] life,” after the movie unknowingly morphed into a “cause.”
I think it kind of hampered us a little bit because the movie became so much of a cause. I think for some of our audience, they were like, ‘What the fuck? We don’t wanna go to a cause. We just wanna watch a fuckin’ movie.’ … It was a great regret in my life that the movie didn’t do better, ’cause I really loved it. It’s not a perfect movie. None of my movies are perfect. I liked what we were doing with it. It was only supposed to be there to entertain people.
In the lead-up to release, the vitriol surrounding Ghostbusters was as fierce as they come, when many online trolls blatantly boycotted the reboot for its female-centric premise. It cast a toxic, reprehensible cloud of hate over the movie, from which it could never truly escape.
Despite bold plans for a fully-fledged sequel, Sony has pumped the brakes on its Ghostbusters franchise for the time being. But it’s not all doom and gloom; original ‘Buster Dan Aykroyd recently gave the thumbs-up for a live-action Netflix series that would give Stranger Things a run for its money.
