Few people would have predicted at the time that a reboot of the beloved Ghostbusters franchise would turn out to be one of the most controversial movies in recent memory, but trying to guess how the internet is going to react to anything these days is a fool’s game. Paul Feig’s 2016 blockbuster went down like a led balloon with longtime fans, who actively went out of their way to sabotage its chances of success in one of the most high-profile and targeted trolling campaigns ever launched by a rogue army of keyboard warriors.
Most of their vitriol was directed towards the fact that the main characters were all played by women, with many decrying it as a gimmick designed to cash in on Hollywood’s recent fascination with attempting to launch female-driven reboots of everything. The stars of Ghostbusters have since admitted that they were personally affected by the overwhelming wave of negativity, while the backlash has been pinpointed as the major reason why the movie under-performed at the box office despite solid reviews.
However, in a recent interview that seems more than likely to stir up the hornet’s nest once again, Feig claimed that the impending Presidential elections in 2016 played a huge part in the online war against Ghostbusters, with certain sections of society having already sharpened their pitchforks ready to instantly dismiss anything that showed women in a position of power.
“I think some really brilliant author needs to write a book about 2016, and how intertwined we were with Hillary Clinton and the anti-Hillary movement. Everyone was at a boiling point. I don’t know if it was having an African American President for eight years that they were teed up, they were just ready to explode. It’s crazy how people got nuts about women trying to be empowered, or be in positions they weren’t normally in, and it was an ugly, ugly year.”
A certain reality TV star turned politician once publicly decried the decision to reboot Ghostbusters with an all-female cast in a social media video posted in January 2015, and if Feig wants to prove that his theory is correct, then maybe he should wait until this year’s election before dropping his three and a half hour cut of the movie to see if it generates the same sort of reactions.
