I might just give it a try. I have an odd sense of humor and also tend to like movies that are hated / not loved as much, who knows I might enjoy it.
Why Is Ghostbusters: Afterlife Immune to Criticisms of the 2016 Reboot?
- Thread starter Shaka Zulu
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I'm a HUGE fan of Ghost Busters and Ghostbusters II. While Answer the Call was a bit more improv jokes that go on WAY too long for my taste, Kate McKinnon's Holtzmann is actually one of my favorite Ghostbusters (after Spengler). She pretty much makes the movie for me. But, I'm also a big Kate McKinnon fan
I'm going to give the movie a try no need to convince me. I'll mention if I like it or not later this week.
My wife and I gave the movie up after about 45 minutes, It just isn't our humor. And we love Ghostbusters 1 and liked 2.
How did we jump from "a group that enjoyed the movie" to claiming that they were specifically the target audience? The movie was intended to be for as many people as possible. Implying that it was aimed only at young LGBTQ audiences is as weird as claiming that anyone who didn't like it is a misogynist.
What have you got to lose other than a few hours?
Ghostbusters was OK, Ghostbusters 2016 was better in some parts and worse in others.
Have some of you seriously never heard of a target audience before? This is like step 2 of anything ever brought to market throughout all of human history.
1: Decide what you are making.
2: Decide who it is for.
Every movie is built towards a targeted audience. Every tv show. Every piece of music. Every piece of art. Every product, period. The only exception is utilities.
Each person has their own unique experiences which form their tastes. Each person can be roughly grouped together into socio-economic classifications where they have roughly experienced many similar situations and are roughly assumed to have similar tastes. Products are devised, the makers of the product decide who would most benefit from this product/who would be most likely to pay for this product/who they want to bring into their fold with his product, and then from there reshape the product and advertising to make it most enjoyable/useful/important/attractive to that audience.
Not being part of the targeted audience doesn't mean you can't like something. Being part of the targeted audience doesn't mean you have to like something. But claiming targeting of audiences doesn't exist is ludicrous. That is saying The Disney Channel doesn't target children with its shows since "companies want the widest market possible". Determining your target audience is one of the first steps in the development of any price of art or commerce.
Ghostbusters 2016 wasn't made for white men in their 30's-60's who were the majority fans of the OG Ghostbusters. 2016 was made for young women and the LGBTQ community to bring in new fans (and, more importantly to Sony, new money). SAYING THIS IS NOT A CRITICISM OF THE FILMMAKERS OR SONY OR THOSE THAT THE MOVIE DID TARGET. It's an acknowledgement that the movie wasn't made for people like me so it's not a huge surprise I didn't enjoy it. But most moves are made for people like me so I'm glad another audience got their own Ghostbusters.
Steven Universe and She-Ra are shows that targeted women and the LGBT community, but Ghostbusters 2016? Nah. It was a summer blockbuster action film with a huge budget meant to target as many people as possible. There were no LGBT themes in the movie whatsoever. Your entire argument boils down to it's a movie for women and the LGBT community because the main cast were all women and as men we all know that girls are icky. Clearly the only way for movies to appeal to men is for the men to do all the cool stuff and the women to only exist as eye candy.
The reason newer movies or shows like Ghostbusters, Star Trek and Star Wars have been adding women as their leads is because the goal is to expand the audience for those movies. The goal is to show women that they're welcome too, but it was never to alienate men. Ghostbusters 2016 was made for men just as much as the original film.
If I remember correctly the reactions weren't exactly "Eeeeeww girls" but more "these women deserve to be raped and killed". So, I'm not sure that this the normal reaction when they do a remake/reboot which isn't "respectful of the original", because, you know, I don't remember something similar when they remade "Ben Hur".
...I haven't made an argument. And I most definitely did not say ANYTHING along the lines of "the main cast were all women and as men we all know that girls are icky. Clearly the only way for movies to appeal to men is for the men to do all the cool stuff and the women to only exist as eye candy."
I said the target audience was young women and LGBTQ and now you're arguing that I'm wrong. You're also confusing target market with target audience so you obviously don't know what the fuck you are talking about.
Btw, no LGBTQ themes in Ghostbusters 2016? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. You should tell the director that, he clearly didn't know that, what with all the times he's talked about them.
Yeah, fuck those guys. What happened to the cast was horrendous. Same with the actress who played Rose in Star Wars and so many other women/POC/LGBTQ in any production. Anytime any person not a cis white male is cast you can open the tweet replies and see dozens, if not hundreds, of posts by a bunch of racist idiots.
Sony's failure was saying that everyone who disliked the movie was one of those people and turning the movie into a cultural proxy war. That alienated a lot of people. Feig himself has said this in interviews, citing it as a factor in why it failed.
Why do you feel that the film was targeting young women and the LGBT community? What in the content of the film or the trailers led you to believe that was the target demographic? Because I'm clearly missing what you're seeing.
Kate McKinnon's character is gay and has a crush on Kristine Wiig, but Sony wouldn't let Feig say so in dialogue so he and McKinnon had to represent it through subtext. McKinnon's character has become a pretty decently sized role model for LGBTQ geeks. If you google you'll see lots of articles about it.
But you haven't provided any evidence to back your claim, ideally ones before the film came out.
You know, I realized that I find it difficult to talk about the artistic merits and demerits of the film considering the horrendous things they said to its actresses. I think what happened simply eclipsed all other considerations. To me it would be as if someone, pointing to a photo of a victim of sexual assault, said: "Yeah, ok, but let's talk about the real crime here: look how she mismatched the belt and shoes! I'm outraged!".
...You don't think that remaking an all cis male film written and directed by cis white males with four female leads, one openly gay playing a gay character, directed by a gay man, written by a gay man and a woman, was intended to target a female, LGBTQ audience?
I thnk an issue here is people are confusing target audience with target market.
Target audience is the smaller subsection of people that a product is made and marketed for.
Target market is everyone else in the same market that the makers of the product want to entice to buy the item aimed at the target audience.
Think of athletics shoes:. They are made for and advertising focuses on athletes. That's the target audience. But the target market is everyone who wants a comfy pair of shoes to wear and run around in the summer.
Ghostbusters already had a big built in fanbase. Sony expected them to spend money on the film regardless of what they put out. So they made and targeted the film at women and LGBTQ who aren't already the traditional Ghostbusters audience to try to expand the appeal of the product, widen the fanbase, and make more money. There's nothing wrong with that.
Then the backlash happened among three groups:
The racist, sexist assholes
The fans that felt alienated because this was a remake in an age of continuations.
People who just thought it didn't look very good.
And for some reason some exec decided the way to make the most money was to say all three groups of people were sexist, racist assholes and turn the film into a 2016 culture war proxy, to the point they had Hillary Clinton busting a Donald Trump ghost.
At which point a large section of the target market went "Yeah, I'm not getting involved with this". Paul Feig himself has stated this is a big reason the movie failed.
Meanwhile the target audience still saw and enjoyed it as they saw themselves represented on screen in a way that is, unfortunately, rare. People outside that target audience, the more generalized target market, when they did see it, didn't tend to have such a positive reaction to the film because to them it wasn't a special moment connecting with them on a personal level. It was just another movie.
Which is why when someone asked for a recommendation if they should see it or not I said hey if you're in the target audience, absolutely! It really connects with people! If you're not, well, it's not nearly as well recieved outside that audience so I'd say skip it.
100%. No matter what else may be said, nothing compares to the harrassment the cast went through.
She's part of the problem to be sure (along with oh-so liberal SNL for giving a venue for that kind of act), but Feig and the producers encouraged that astoundingly offensive routine, and hyped it in the marketing campaign. For all of Feig's self-destructive attacks on the GB fanbase, he had no ground to stand on by directing a modern day screaming minstrel/mammy stereotype. So many black TV audiences & movie goers have long criticized Jones for her routines, but Feig was the one who took it to its most visible level yet without as much as a raised eyebrow about what her performances project to the world.
He's no naive child. Again, screw him.
