When looking at the majority of films produced by Hollywood, there is a clear demographic they are pandering towards. Most movies are catered to the male audience: the protagonists are male, the plot is intended to engage a male viewer, and the content is designed to be relatable to men. When certain films, especially blockbuster franchises, attempt to create a new film centering around women in star roles, there is a lot of backlash. The role reversal in regards to just gender creates a firestorm of angry reviews and comments.
Dan Aykroyd Defends Ghostbusters: Answer the Call Years After Sexist Reviews
When looking at franchise reboots, many diehard fans mask their misogyny by saying the new iteration is a disgrace to the original. But, in a People Exclusive last month, Dan Aykroyd, one of the original Ghostbusters, defends the all-female reboot, Ghostbusters: Answer the Call, from 2016 starring Melissa McCarthy, Kristin Wigg, Kate McKinnon, and Leslie Jones. While promoting his new Audible Original Blues Brothers: The Arc of Gratitude, Aykroyd told People his thoughts on the film.
“Boy, I liked that film,” Aykroyd said. “I thought that the villain at the end was great. I loved so much of it. And of course, Kate McKinnon and Leslie Jones and Melissa McCarthy and Kristen Wiig, you’re never going to do better than that.”
While the kind words are validating for all those who have defended the movie, they really do nothing to help with the film’s criticism. When the movie was announced, hate was flying around the internet for unjust reasons. Aykroyd explained in his interview with People why he waited so long to speak up.
“I was mad at them at the time because I was supposed to be a producer on there, and I didn’t do my job, and I didn’t argue about costs. And it costs perhaps more than it should, and they all do. All these movies do,” Aykroyd said.
Aykroyd, while in his heart wanted to defend, waited 8 years to do so, well past any public opinions about the movie circulating. In fact, two other Ghostbuster movies, Ghostbusters: Afterlife and Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, have been created without a female lead cast. Neither have received the high volume of negative reviews like Ghostbusters: Answer the Call, even though both are new editions to the beloved franchise.
The Ghostbusters: Answer the Call reboot faced scathing reviews before it was even released in July of that year. When the movie was first announced with the female-led cast, critics across the internet had very strong, negative opinions to share. When the first trailer for the movie was released, it was again met with a negative response and later would become the most disliked film trailer ever on YouTube, and the ninth most disliked video on YouTube with over one million dislikes. There was a lot of discourse on why this movie received such hateful and angry responses. Some believed it was due to nostalgia for the original film, and others said it was the lack of interest in reboots. But plenty of reboots have been made recently before and after Ghostbusters: Answer the Call came out, so why was there such a visceral reaction to this one?
It all comes down to the fact that this was a female-led cast in a franchise of previously all men. McCarthy, Wiig, and McKinnon all received many sexist tweets and remarks about the movie, while Leslie Jones faced both sexist and racist tweets. Those who were writing the reviews of the movie had created a culture of hate surrounding this movie. We all read movie reviews, and oftentimes are persuaded by the reviews out there on whether we go see a movie or not. But maybe we should rethink that.
The Numbers
In a 2018 study by the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, it was found that of the top 100 films in 2017, 77.8% of the critics were male and 22.2% were female. This is significant when paired with the results found in another study by Martha M. Lausen, Ph.D. at San Diego State University: “Men reviewers awarded higher average ratings to films with male protagonists than female reviewers” and “women reviewers gave higher ratings to films featuring female protagonists than male reviewers.” It was also found that 53.2% of these critics were white men, which could account for the increase in racist remarks Leslie Jones had thrown at her. If the majority of reviews are written by men, and these men are more likely to award higher ratings to movies with a male lead than women are, are the movies that are getting rave reviews good movies or are they just male-forward?
Negative Reviews For Female-Led Movies Continue On
We have seen this pattern before 2016, and, unfortunately, we have seen it since. A lot of female-driven movies inducted into a franchise receive this Ghostbusters: Answer the Call treatment. For example, Captain Marvel. The Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) began in 2008 with Iron Man and 11 years and 21 movies later Captain Marvel, released in 2019, was the first female-led superhero movie Marvel put out. Although it did well at the box office, earning $1.1 billion, this movie received an influx of negative, sexist reviews from online trolls directed at both the movie and Brie Larson, the actor who played Captain Marvel. A large amount of these negative reviews were written before the movie had even come out, which then lowered the Rotten Tomato score to 28% before the premiere.
Ocean’s 8 is another film that faced a large backlash for its predominantly female cast in an otherwise male-dominated franchise. The first three Ocean’s movies had almost an entirely male cast, so when Ocean’s 8, the fourth in the franchise, was announced, people on the internet had a lot of things to say. Cate Blanchett, Mindy Kaling, Sarah Paulson, and others from the cast were very vocal about the misogynistic nature of movie reviewers and the elevated power that they have in the industry.
In an interview with Yahoo News, Kaling said, “I think there is a critic who will damn it in a way because they don’t understand it, because they come at it at a different point of view, and they’re so powerful, Rotten Tomatoes.”
We need to be more aware of how much online reviews affect our watchlist. We need to see movies because we want to see movies, and then decide if it’s a good or bad movie for ourselves. The reviewers probably aren’t experiencing the movies like you will. Movies starring women, especially women of color, need to be appreciated and if the reviewers aren’t up to the task, then we should be.
We’ll leave you with this quote from Meryl Streep during a 2015 panel at the Women In The World Summit:
“Women are so used to that active empathizing with the active protagonist of a male-driven plot. That’s what we’ve done all our lives. You read history, you read great literature, Shakespeare, it’s all fellas,” Streep said. “But they’ve never had to do the other thing. And the hardest thing for me, as an actor, is to have a story that men in the audience feel like they know what I feel like. That’s a really hard thing. It’s a very hard thing for them to put themselves in the shoes of a female protagonist.”
What's Your Reaction?
