Lady ghost buster cast update#
Lady ghost buster cast tv#

Instead of talking about the movies on their merits, we are left talking about the bad-faith attacks. The harm also extended beyond attacks on specific people associated with the movies, by making it nearly impossible to have a conversation about Ghostbusters - or Captain Marvel or The Last Jedi or any other similarly targeted property - that was actually about the movies.

Lady ghost buster cast update#

In most cases, the attacks usually happened before anyone had seen the films, prompting review aggregation websites like Rotten Tomatoes to update their policies around audience scores to prevent trolls from artificially deflating scores before a movie’s release date. The vicious threats and blatantly racist attacks were clearly the product of the worst parts of Ghostbusters’ so-called “fandom.” The same tactics would be repeated in later assaults on other movies deemed too “political” by the alt-right, which was a not-so-coded way of saying movies that featured women and people of color in lead roles in franchise films they considered to belong to the “true” fans, rather than the films’ creators: Black Panther, Captain Marvel, Star Wars: The Last Jedi, and more. How the all-female Ghostbusters reboot became a lightning rod of controversy Yiannopoulos’s campaign against Jones ultimately reached the point where it became part of the 2016 election cycle and a flashpoint in the alt-right’s culture war.Īnd that was part of the point as one Twitter user who spent months relentlessly attacking the Ghostbusters filmmakers and cast proclaimed, “Ghostbusters 2016 is a declaration of a culture war.” The casting of the film’s four stars - Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, Kate McKinnon, and Leslie Jones - was declared to be a “SJW” capitulation to “political correctness,” and Jones, the only woman of color in the cast, became the target of a particularly hateful online assault led by self-styled provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos (who was eventually banned from Twitter as a result). The Ghostbusters backlash was also perpetuated largely by a violently vocal minority and took some of the same shape as Gamergate, particularly in the ways it targeted women and people of color.

In some ways, the Ghostbusters backlash was a sequel to Gamergate, which began with the bizarre and misogynistic harassment of a number of women in the gaming world, grew into a full-blown online troll onslaught, and eventually became a blueprint for recruiting mostly young men to the burgeoning alt-right. Columbia Pictures The attacks on Ghostbusters and subsequent movies set a template for a different, degraded kind of criticism But in retrospect, the Great Ghostbusters Apocalypse of spring 2016 was a harbinger of things to come, and a window into the ways the internet can fan the flames and provide a platform for the toxic corners of pop culture fandoms to act on their worst impulses.

That skepticism, a familiar response to most announcements of reboots and remakes, was justifiable one clear trend of the 2010s was the never-ending resurrection of pop culture properties we thought were long over, mostly with no good reason beyond “nostalgia sells.” But more generalized skepticism over the idea of an all-woman Ghostbusters was quickly eclipsed by a bizarrely overblown backlash, months before the film even came out.

Was there really enough life in Ghostbusters to sustain a whole new reboot? That’s one reason why the mid-decade announcement of a new “gender-swapped” version of Ghostbusters - which, like the 1984 original, would star four performers, some familiar faces from Saturday Night Live, but this time they’d be women - was met with skepticism. But without the nostalgia factor in play, each successive Ghostbusters film or property, at best, feels like a funny idea for a sketch stretched out to feature-length, then buoyed by its performers’ name recognition and irresistible comic performances and, eventually, nostalgia.

Lady ghost buster cast tv#

None of the Ghostbusters movies are particularly good, though you might argue the original was great, in the way that cult comedy classics from the 1980s often take on a life of their own with people who grew up wearing out their VHS copies or rewatching them on TV whenever they aired.