Here we go again with the anti-female fanboys. While I'm sure that played a role it wasn't a big role. Fury Road and The Force Awakens both had female protagonists and they succeeded big-time at the Box Office, I suspect Rogue One will do the same this winter which also has a female protagonist and I think it goes without saying that Star Wars has a much larger and more militant fanboy base than Ghostbusters does.
Remember, in order to push the so-called "sexist" blame agenda into a situation, one must ignore facts, such as the success of the films you cite. If politics had any negative impact on GB, it begins with the director's constant attacks on potential audience members voicing an opinion. No responsible studio or marketing agency on earth would ever suggest that immature behavior is part of a sound strategy for success. Feig used the film as his platform of hateful rants.
The problem is that it's just not a very good movie and if there's any "feminism" backlash from "men-inists" it'd be due to the movie being overt about this "message" between the cast and the movie itself having stuff in it that could be construed as anti-men. (Most of the men in the movie are portrayed as dumb and/or weak-willed and the antagonist in ghost-forum is defeated by shooting him in the ghost-junk.)
But exposing that clear misandrist message is attacked as being a "woman hater." In
Dawn of Justice, Snyder did not need to belittle men in order to make Wonder Woman succeed as a strong individual & superhero, yet
Ghostbusters--and its male director who seems to dislike his own gender--commits the same kind of deliberate stereotyping / belittling seen in decades of misogynistic films, as a means of elevating one group. So much for progress.
At any rate, the movie dropped 53% over the week which is fairly significant, though not unusual looking at most other movies. But looking at previous comedies from Feig/McCarthy it's pretty strong. Bridesmaids dropped 21% between weeks, The Heat 40%,, Spy 44%. McCarthy's Tammy saw a 179% increase between first and second weeks (along with an increase in screens) and then a 41% drop between weeks.
So that's a lot of numbers, but shows that Ghostbusters isn't quite making as much of an impact as they had hoped and it's got two big challengers the next two weeks at BO and it was still beaten by a now 3-week-old animated movie making it 3rd place for the week.
But those films all had much bigger openings. A 53% drop on a mediocre $46 million opening weekend is pretty bad. The hope was that the movie would have excellent legs like Feig's other films, but that's clearly not the case.
Yes, it is bad, and the drop will continue, but this film was not produced on the hope of matching the performances of other Feig films--this was Sony trying to play in the big leagues of
franchise blockbuster, and Feig proved he--and his anything other than creatively motivated vision of
Ghostbusters was not on that level, hence the poor box office performance.
Personally I think most people outside a specific group of nerds just don't give a shit about the Ghostbusters franchise. I know I don't.
Franchises are not guaranteed to be successfully rebooted, even in a situation where generations of film goers still show a
strong love for the original production. Moreover, the original is very much tied to the early 1980s in its execution--including the performance choices by the stars, and no one was going to recapture or
replace that. All of what made the '84 film great could not survive as a 2016 film in the hands of a desperate studio and a woefully misguided director, both inexplicably thinking the name and emotion invested in the original would just magically transfer to any assemblage of crap with the GB brand glued to it--particularly (as noted earlier) if it is clear the reboot is not existing for purely creative reasons.
