The new ghostbusters movie looks awful - it's not a thing about women leads, it's that it looks really bad in a way the original isn't. I know that's subjective, but watch the trailer:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3ugHP-yZXw" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3ugHP-yZXw</a><p>Just bad.<p>There are a lot of bad movies, but this one walks around in the corpse of a much loved and nostalgic intellectual property that a bunch of people wanted. They got that.<p>Is this really about sexism?<p>This pattern has shown up a lot recently when an intellectual property is used by something that the original audience doesn't fit into (e.g. the last fable game that got canceled). It's a pretty silly use of an IP - the original audience is where the value comes from.
I actually agree with much of the articles reasoning, other than the title, and everything about Ghostbusters:<p>> More specifically, a vocal portion of men on the internet — shall we say — go out of their way to make their voices heard when it comes to judging entertainment aimed at women, and that appears to be happening with the new “Ghostbusters.”<p>The thing with the new Ghostbusters has nothing to do with them being women. I'd see Bridesmaids 2 or any other comedy with Kristen Wiig (probably have), and I like Paul Feig fine.<p>The problem with the new Ghostbusters is that it's not Ghostbusters, not that it's necessarily a bad comedy.<p>The old Ghostbusters is shot and built up as a dark disaster movie, that just happens to be really funny. The new one is a Paul Feig movie (again, not knocking). It doesn't fit.<p>I noticed the same thing in the last season of Veep when Ianucci left. Instead of it shot more like an Office-type documentary (without the interviews, like its predecessor The Thick of It), if you look at the Christmas episode (of Veep) as the clearest example, it's shot like any other honestly mediocre sitcom, with saturated colors and honestly phoned in jokes.<p>Sorry about the tirade, but as a guy who does like good female media (Broad City and Lady Dynamite are my latest favorites), seeing this argument be made with terrible examples is unfortunate.
When I saw the new Ghostbusters trailer in the cinema (yes, I still go there), I thought it was a parody film. I'm not kidding.<p>Nowadays, people always try to find ways to be offended. A women-led movie got bad ratings? It must be the patriarchy!
Nobody wonders if it might have been just a bad movie, as I, as a man, also enjoy women-led movies (I mean movies in the cinemas, not what you think :P). Hoewever, the new Ghostbusters just looks like a big horrible painful joke, and that's why the ratings tanked.<p>Given it's so hard to even assess statistically, how many men are among movie raters, this entire article stands on weak feet.
I won't argue that an average score on its own doesn't provide you with information about the diversity of opinion that led to that average, I'm sure we could do better in this regard. Perhaps something like Amazon does with the graphical representation showing how many people gave each star rating on a product review.<p>What I do have two problems with is the framing of this article when it comes to the new Ghostbusters film. This quote is a useful starting point for looking at those problems:<p>"More specifically, a vocal portion of men on the internet — shall we say — go out of their way to make their voices heard when it comes to judging entertainment aimed at women"<p>First of all, is the new Ghostbusters film meant to be aimed at women? If you look at it at a superficial level perhaps. To me, when you take on a beloved film franchise, you should make something that stays true to the spirit of the earlier films. The earlier Ghostbusters films have appeal across the board, why can't the new film have the same?<p>Secondly, the issue people are having with the Ghostbusters reboot is not really because all the new Ghostbusters are female. I, for one, think it was a good idea to do so, as it provided something new, and could have helped it to break from conventions whilst still providing something recognisable as a Ghostbusters film. The main problem people have with the film (and yes, they are just basing it on trailers at this point), is that it appears to be a generic, formulaic comedy with Ghostbusters dressing. For example, with the 'sassy black lady' Ghostbuster, the vast majority of the backlash isn't because she's a woman, the majority of the backlash is because she's playing a hackneyed stereotype. There were other parts of the trailers that were similarly paint-by-numbers Hollywood comedy.<p>Perhaps the trailers did the film a great disservice and there are better moments to be found in the film itself, but early impressions are not too great IMO.
The original Ghostbusters was a laugh, but what made it so memorable for me was the weird texture and depth built-in to its lore and tech. Classic!<p>The previews I've seen of the reboot present like schlock; some writing-by-committee mess. Based on my recent disappointment watching Finding Dory, I suppose muddled writing to be a common affliction in Hollywood, even for the top studios.
How does the author know which reviewers are female or male?<p>I do wonder how the review sites could allow reviews for a movie that isn't released yet, seems the few prerelease viewers isn't worth the chance of being gamed(or guarantee?)
There is a movie rating website called filmaffinity <a href="http://www.filmaffinity.com/en/main.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.filmaffinity.com/en/main.html</a> that has an interesting feature called "Movie Soulmates".<p>It matches your movie ratings against the rest of the users, selecting the ones with a highest coincidence.<p>Then you can discover unseen films highly rated by people with, allegedly, your same taste.<p>I also found Tastekid <a href="http://www.tastekid.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.tastekid.com/</a> and FilmFish <a href="https://www.film-fish.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.film-fish.com/</a> quite accurate.
I strongly enjoy movies by Studio Ghibli, and they mostly are female-led. Lets look at the latest, exclusively female-led movie from 2014 called When Marnie Was There.<p>IMDB: Men made 7779 votes with average 7.7, women made 2881 votes with average 7.9<p><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3398268/ratings-male" rel="nofollow">http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3398268/ratings-male</a><p>That is 0.2 points difference. If we look at ponyo, the difference is even less, with 0.1 points difference. If there is a bias, it is not exactly tanking the rating, and someone would have work hard to identify if its because women rate women-led movies higher than average, or males who rate it lower.
I have no opinion on Ghosbusters, but I just wanted to add that maybe it's not all out of spite and out of hatred towards media aimed at women? I'm a man and I would on average rate any rom-com that I saw with my fiancee much lower than she would - but at the same time, she would usually rate any action move that I liked much lower than I would. It's not because I hate women or she hates men - it's just.....not everything is for everyone? I have no idea how you would reflect it in ratings though?
I don't buy that Ghostbusters success will hinge on the gender of the lead actors - the leads in the new film have a lot to live up to in Dan Aykroyd and Bill Murray.
This is mostly covered in the article, but anyway:<p>I see a few overlapping effects here:<p>1) Aggregators like Tomatometer rank based on broad appeal. That's why Toy Story is one of the highest scored of all time (if you don't like Toy Story, you're <i>dead inside</i>), and Fight Club can be beloved to many but still not A grade.<p>2) Audiences are slowly getting tired of cynical reboots. Sure, I understand the harsh reality that means Hollywood has to play as risk averse as possible, and that recycling beloved IP has slightly-better-than break even results on average, but you can't expect movie watchers to gush over story retreads.<p>3) Yes, the loudest and most obnoxious voices on the internet are also the ones who will go to the most trouble to tank your reviews. This is not specific to movies. The fact that men are doing this for Ghostbusters does not reveal an inherent misogyny overall, just that said mysoginistic neckbeards are more likely to invest their time in trolling the internet (the 4chan effect).<p>I have no trouble with an all female lead cast. I just wish they didn't waste all that potential on such a crappy regurgitation.
Ratings (for movies or whatever) are not broken, they just are a limited model of appreciation by a cohort. All statistical models have their limits, that does not make them «broken», just somewhat inaccurate (ie. with varying levels of accuracy).<p>The author shows it with the gender of the voters, but it would very probably have been the same with IQ, education level, zipcode, country, income level, etc
>Essentially, male users were more likely to rate television shows with a female-heavy audience lower than female users would rate male-centric television lower.<p>If you look at the gender breakdown on imdb for movies that have been out for a while (meaning that people have actually have had the time to watch them), it seems like the differences between the genders are nowhere near as big as for the new ghostbusters movie. The original Ghostbusters for example is 7.8 (m) vs 7.6 (f) [0]. It doesn't look like imdb provides the gender breakdown of votes in their publicly available dataset[1], but it would be interesting to see someone preform a more rigorous analysis (than me looking at movies I can remember at the top of my head).<p>[0] <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087332/ratings-male" rel="nofollow">http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087332/ratings-male</a><p>[1] <a href="http://www.imdb.com/interfaces/" rel="nofollow">http://www.imdb.com/interfaces/</a>
> So, do you have a preconceived notion of how good or bad the “Ghostbusters” movie is going to be? Of course you do, you clicked on an article with “Ghostbusters” in the title.<p>I blindly clicked because of fivethirtyeight in the url.
"if we aggregate the ratings, they don't show what we want".<p>"we blame men who obviously didn't even see the movie, don't ask us how we know".
>Men were tanking the ratings of shows aimed at women.<p>Yes. and Im one of those men. Maybe, just maybe STOP marketing those 'women shows' to men?<p>Remember recent Deadpool marketing campaign around Valentines Day painting it as a romantic comedy? This is what most 'movies and shows aimed at women' do, because they just cant let of the male market $$. "Hey go watch this cool new SciFi movie" never mentions its a Urban fantasy romance novel with 70% screen time taken by woman protagonist crying on someones shoulder.
The last "movie" I enjoyed was Terminator 2. Not too long after that, I realised that I had seen all possible combinations of ways that you can tell a story in 90 minutes.<p>Music Industry and Film Industry have essentially just become about personalities and big money. They can peddle garbage because everyone buys it.<p>I just hope that books are not next because that is all that remains of quality entertainment.