Amidst the online ugliness that’s been unfolding around the new Captain Marvel movie lately, many a comparison has been made to 2016’s female-led Ghostbusters, which was famously the subject of its own heavy backlash in the months leading up to its release.
It therefore comes as little surprise to see that Paul Feig is feeling pretty sympathetic towards the team behind Carol Danvers’ solo debut, and in response to the latest flood of negative takes on Captain Marvel’s Rotten Tomatoes page, the director has taken to Twitter to blast the trolls:
“What a sad sad pathetic group of people are who organize to do things like this. I mean, seriously. In the immortal words of William Shatner, ‘Get a life.’ Good lord.”
The backlash to the 2016 Ghostbusters has been in the spotlight once again this year, now that Jason Reitman is at work on a Ghostbusters 3 that follows in the continuity of the first two movies. Though Feig has given the project his endorsement, he also defended actress Leslie Jones’ right to say otherwise after the reboot star received a barrage of angry responses for voicing her disapproval.
In any case, while the Ghostbusters reboot ultimately couldn’t survive the bad buzz and underperformed at the box office, Captain Marvel seems on course to do a fair bit better. So far, Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck’s film has taken in an impressive $20.7 million from Thursday night previews alone – a higher figure than the equivalent for any other superhero solo debut save for Black Panther.
As for the film’s first weekend gross, THR had Captain Marvel’s domestic haul tracking at $125 million to $145 million earlier today, but we’ll check back with the actual figure in just a couple of days.
