Do you think Sony screwed up?

Ghostbusters Discussion General Ghostbusters Discussion
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I will say one thing about the recent DC comic book movies. They are proving my point that box office isn’t the only thing studios worry about. Man of Steel and BvS weren’t flops by any means…and yet WB is reportedly falling over itself trying to change the tone of their next films to be more “funny,” and less “gloomy.” It’s a big reason SS was hacked to bits in the editing room.

Why do that if their movies are making money? Answer: Because overall reception matters too. And WB knows theirs is currently very poor. WB execs would kill for a 73% RT score about now. Heck, even a measily 50% would be a nice change, lol.

So yeah, again, GB16 detractors really need to find a stronger argument than “It did/didn’t make money.”

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Not making money is an extremely strong argument though isn’t it? It shows people stayed away. Is it the only thing that matters? Heck no. You’re 100% correct about DC though. They are in panic mode even though their films made money. They want what Marvel has, audience loyalty(this is coming from someone who enjoyed BvS). The opening weekend box office for the DC films show that people are interested in seeing these movies, it’s just that they didn’t like the product. With Ghostbusters people just weren’t interested in what Sony was selling. they didn’t care enough to judge the product for themselves. That’s an important thing to keep in mind. Ghostbusters never had that strong opening weekend Hollywood execs love to brag about. It was a popcorn fart.

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I think the studio absolutely missed the mark. I can’t say too much that hasn’t already been brought up. Like the Marketing for instance, yeah someone really messed up there. For me Ghostbusters ATC just wasn’t that funny. I have seen the movie 4 times as of right now, and it seems to get worse upon each viewing. I can tell when this cast Ad-libs because the scenes just drag on. I definately won’t be picking up the extended cut to see the scenes drag on longer with these characters ad-libbing even more. The only thing I continue to enjoy is the finale where they are fighting the swarm of Ghosts. It is a pretty epic scene, it’s hard to not get pumped when Holtsman pulls out the duel proton pistols and you can hear the ghostbusters score in the background. Unfortunately the whole scene just ends. After that we get the scene with Abby and Erin in between dimensions like the end of Poltergeist and Big Hero Six.

Now ATC doesn’t ruin the franchise for me, I can just ignore this movie just like it ignores the original films. I do hold out hope that something awesome will come from this movie even if the movie itself was a little disappointing. :slight_smile: :slight_smile: :slight_smile:

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Second place isn’t a fart, guys. Sorry, lol. I didn’t see Independence Day 2, but it sounds like that might be a better fit.

And I do wonder why we praise the subtlety and class of GB84, but then use words like “fart” to critique the reboot. If we’re going to insult the reboot, can’t we at least try to keep it in universe, so to speak? :wink:

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I did a whole big post about this already, so I’ll be brief.

Yes, they screwed up. Paul Feig was the wrong director, and apparently a terrible writer. But I can forgive that.

Honestly, I’m more angry at the marketing than anything else. I could have dealt with the movie as it was. It’s not good, but I could have dealt with it. A reboot that’s not as good as the original? Happens all the time. But Sony thought they could bully fans into liking it, which shows a special kind of stupid at work. That’s what got me angry. I think that’s why most of us are so divided on it. Some of us can take the movie for what it is, and others are still bitter because we wanted better and were mocked for that.

But I wouldn’t expect Sony to learn their lesson from this any time soon. This is the company that hired Tom Rothman after he greenlit Fant4stic. They’re not quick on the uptake.

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I can pretty much guarantee that the sequel version of this movie is not a significantly bigger hit – in fact, it might have even been less of a success at the box office. When you get a Harrison Ford back in an Indiana Jones movie, for example, Harrison Ford was already a movie star all on his own, and you’re combining it with the nostalgia for the franchise. Ghostbusters “ended” as a movie franchise far sooner than many others, does not have legitimate movie stars in the same way a Harrison Ford is a movie star, and although the original movie is beloved, I don’t think there’s the sense that it was ever an ongoing thing that those people really wanted to see more of in the same way they did an Indiana Jones. If we’d gotten to Ghostbusters 3 on the initial run and it was also at least somewhat liked, then maybe, but even then that doesn’t necessarily bridge the gap.

This is the same summer that Independence Day Resurgence bombed. That movie also has a limited depth as a franchise to date (one movie), a movie which did not put viewers in a position they were demanding more, and they lost their legitimate movie star in Will Smith (and turned to Jeff Goldblum, whose level and type of celebrity is pretty similar in nature to Bill Murray). It’s a pretty perfect template of how a Ghostbusters sequel would’ve performed, except you probably don’t have Murray and you don’t have Harold Ramis. I’m afraid I can’t picture Dan Aykroyd or Ernie Hudson meaning that much more to Ghostbusters 3 as Brent Spiner and Bill Pullman meant to Independence Day Resurgence in terms of the general public, and your missing star would only have added Goldblum-level wattage to the project.

Furthermore, the ease with which one imagines a more successful sequel is even easier to undermine when you then have to go back to the drawing board of who actually gets to direct it. Reitman removed himself from the running, so in as much as his name means something to the 2016 public (I imagine less than Roland Emmerich, who at least is famous for making a certain type of disaster movie), you lose that too. So, you still have to choose from modern comedy directors. That means Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, Judd Apatow, Nicholas Stoller, etc., names who I do not think would be much more popular with the ■■■■■■■■ fans here than Paul Feig was. Then you gotta imagine who else gets cast in it as the new group, and so on and so forth.

The problem Sony encountered when releasing the movie this summer wasn’t that people wanted to see those old characters again. It’s that there wasn’t nearly as much widespread public passion for the series as they thought. That’s where the marketing for the new one comes in: if it had looked exciting to viewers independent of their interest in the original, then it would’ve been more successful, but that was the core hook they hung the campaign on.

The genesis of the character is that Feig and Dippold wrote a screenplay in which she served a function in relation to the other characters, Feig chose to cast Kate McKinnon in that role, and then Feig directed her to make choices that McKinnon interpreted into the character as she appears on screen.

That’s probably kind of a dismissive answer but it’s like, she’s part of the whole. She only exists in this context. Maybe you weren’t really saying that, but you can’t just pop her out of the film and put her in an imaginary one. Every factor that went into her creation would be different.

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Ghostbusters is not, has never been, a skit comedy. So why turn it into one? Personally I find that type of comedy to be the weakest there is and it’s the last style of comedy I want in a GB movie.

There’s many different type of comedians. They gave us the the female equivalent of the Adam Sandler troupe. It’s all too easy too see those four characters played by the cast of Pixels. I’d have preferred the female equivalent of, well, the Ghostbusters cast.

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You are seriously underestimating how much of a factor nostalgia plays into this. People don’t go to see Harrison Ford, they go for Indiana Jones. Name me one successful Harrison Ford movie not named Star Wars or Indiana Jones made within the last 10-15 years. The people want to see an old friend get into an adventure and kill some ■■■■’s/Commies. Ghostbusters 3 would’ve been at LEAST as big as Indy 4. GB3 had been hyped for YEARS. The ID4 sequel without Will Smith is something no one asked for in 2016. 2002? Maybe. But not 2016. Gb3 would’ve been massive. I have zero doubt about that. People want to see the heroes they grew up with back on the big screen. The millennial generation is nostalgic like no other generation in history. No one thought Jurrasic World was going to be as huge as it was, certainly it was going to be a hit, but it was truly a monster. It was another one of those movies that had been promised for awhile. While it didn’t have any of the original cast, it was still a continuation of the mythology/continuity of the first 3.

Ghostbusters should have been one of those untouchable classics that don’t get remade/rebooted. It’s in the same league as Back to the Future. Imagine the outcry if a reboot was announced tomorrow of BTTF? Dogs and cats living together, Mass hysteria! Same thing happened with Ghostbusters. It bombed. Audiences avoided it and the Internet hated it.

And yes. That’s an extremely dismissive answer to my question about Holtzman. Characters go thru iterations before arriving to the final form you see. Just look at how different Winston was suppose to be or Louis Tully. The Holtzman character reminded me of a mix between Egon and Ray with a dash of Venkman. Was that the intention? How much of it was Mackinnon or how much of it was on the page. This is more of the type of nitty gritty I wanted on the character. Since she’s literally the only thing that worked for me in the reboot I wouldn’t mind seeing her in a proper GB movie. This is what I meant. Of course you can’t transplant a character like that in real life, I was just using my imagination.

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It’s cool if you don’t like sketch comedy, but the original Ghostbusters cast came from sketch comedy, honed their skills and comedic personas there. Going to sketch comedy to find a new cast is very appropriate.

Bringing in actors who occasionally happen to get cast in comedies is what’s left field.

I personally don’t see GB16 as akin to Adam Sandler’s style. That’s like the questionable Scooby Doo comparison. Fans don’t like the movie, or don’t want to like it, therefore it must be compared to the worst things possible (no offence to Sandler, I did like Chuck and Larry, lol).

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Exactly. There was so much missed potential with the reboot.

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I think of it like I think of the Dukes of Hazzard movie. It did a couple things well, but ultimately failed to capture what made people like the original in the first place.

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By that rationale, when they make a movie without Ford, it will be just as warmly received.

Jurassic World is kind of a perfect example of how a Ghostbusters 3 wasn’t going to be a hit. The reason that movie was a success is because you didn’t even have to see the originals to be intrigued. None of the movie’s extremely cursory ties to the original (Henry Wu, the fleeting appearance of the old park, a few other blink-and-you’ll-miss-them references) were really part of the advertising. It’s why the next movie is Jurassic World 2, not Jurassic Park 5.

There is this really easy to disprove myth that fans are all that meaningful in terms of box office returns. Fans are a finite pool of resources. Even within that already limited number of people, some of the fans aren’t gonna like a new entry or project. Even if you were to say there were 20 million die hard Ghostbusters fans who would see the movie twice no matter what, at $10 per ticket that’s $400m, which is good, and better than the reboot did, but still short of making the movie a massive success, and a gross overestimate. Jurassic World did over three times that. You need the general, unaffiliated public, and in massive, massive quantities.

This is just a mystifying thing. We used to understand that the value of stories is that they get retold over and over. If you say Ghostbusters should be left alone, in 50 years, it’ll be remembered by very few.

I love BTTF. I can’t imagine them improving on it. But nothing’s sacred. Far better movies have been redone, multiple times. It’s fine.

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Have they remade Dr. Strangelove? Young Frankenstein? Blazing Saddles? Duck Soup? Are those movies forgotten? I think you are confusing oral stories retold from generation to generation with, ya know, movies which exist in a preserved format and can be accessed at any time by anyone. Forgotten? This isn’t 1625. Great classics are never forgotten. You know what will be forgotten? GB16.

You misunderstood my Harrison Ford comment, maybe it’s because I wasn’t clear enough. People go to see Harrison play Jones. They go to see an old friend back on screen getting into an adventure. I was taking apart your previous “Harrison Ford is a big star” argument for why a GB3 wouldn’t be as big as Indy 4. I noticed you couldn’t name a single successful Ford movie from the last 15 years that wasn’t from Lucasfilm. It’s got nothing to do with star power. That’s not how movies work anymore(except for maybe comedies). The brand is the new star. But it’s important for studios to understand what audiences respond to in those brands. You can’t just reboot one of the most beloved comedies of all time and think it will be a big success. That alienates the audience who fell in love with what the brand represents: the characters.

Jurrasic World was not a reboot/remake. It’s the 4th film in the Jurrasic Saga. It used what came before as a backdrop. If you saw that movie in theatres maybe your theatre reacted the same way mine did during the films biggest sequence. When that T-Rex first comes out during the climax, my theatre went batshit nuts. Audiences loved that moment. You know why? Because of the established T-Rex badassery from the earlier films. It’s an earned character moment that was 22 years in the making. The T-Rex is a character.

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This is a copy and paste from something I said on the reboot effects forum, which kind of relates to what you just said:

I was talking about using techniques to create connections, and not retelling stories, but it’s kind of similar. You’re absolutely right that classics are no longer forgotten, but that doesn’t mean that the general public will enjoy them (no matter how unfortunate that might be.)

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I don’t we can underestimate the tendancy of young people to be disinterested in the movies of their parents’ generation. That’s normal and healthy actually, part of growing up. And sometimes a reboot is exactly what can perk their interest. That’s exactly what happened with the Star Trek reboots, they brought new fans to the originals.

Jurassic World is one of those re-quels. They rehash the original story like a reboot, but force in some old references to make it appear to be a sequel.

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It really depends on the individual, Bullitt with Steve McQueen is one of my favorite films.

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Yup, I was the same way growing up. But I was the exception, lol.

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My theater audiences had much the same reaction to the cameos in GB16. They didn’t need the actors to literally be playing their original characters for it to be special and meaningful.

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Movies are still part of that tradition of storytelling. Admittedly, it’s easier to apply this theory to ideas or themes when it comes to movies, as in stories that tell us the same truths about growing up or falling in love or coming to terms with mortality and whatnot, but film more than any medium has started to become recursive. Someone on a podcast I listened to recently said this, which is applicable here: the '70s was the generation that lived it, and the next generation is the one that saw it in the movies and is now echoing it.

Plus, the thing about Ghostbusters is, it’s really hard to look at it and see what qualities in it anyone believes are so sacrosanct that the film can’t ever be remade. Unless you’re talking about the franchise on an almost corporate level, in terms of the logo and the song and the designs, the things that make the movie special are four comedians having a perfect chemistry, working on a big scale that includes spectacle, triumphing over something extraordinary, which are qualities that get made into lots of movies (to varying degrees of effectiveness).

Look, maybe it’s not the perfect example. My point is that even Bill Murray returning to Ghostbusters really doesn’t have a fraction of the allure to the mainstream public as Harrison Ford returning to Indiana Jones. Murray’s star wattage is lower, Ghostbusters as a franchise does not have the same legacy as Indiana Jones, and that’s if you had Murray at all, which I think we can be 99% sure they would not. My point still stands that I believe he carries about as much weight as Jeff Goldblum did for the audience in Independence Day: Resurgence, and that Aykroyd and Hudson would carry even less. Especially if we’re talking a movie that would have been explicitly and obviously designed to pass the torch to another generation.

I really enjoyed Jurassic World and I liked that moment for that reason, but again, it’s just plain a fact, by demographic age groups, that a significant chunk of the audience for that movie was not alive with the original film came out, and did not necessarily have any nostalgia for it. The movie was not marketed on a sense that this was a sequel, that you had to know the original characters or the original story to enjoy it. It’s there for viewers to enjoy if they want to, but, again, that movie is becoming a trilogy of films, explicitly about these same new characters, the sequels to which will be Jurassic World 2 and Jurassic World 3. Viewers who want to do so will be able to watch the Jurassic World trilogy as its own thing without ever going back to the original three.

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Guess what? I wasn’t alive when the original Ghostbusters came out. That is a terrible point to argue. People see movies on DVD, TV etc. I wasn’t alive for Jaws, Raiders, a Temple of Doom, E.T, Close Encounters, Back to the Future etc but I love them with all my soul.

Bill Murray in a Ghostbusters outfit is the same as Harrison Ford dressed as Indiana Jones. I think you are just flat out wrong here. Ghostbusters out grossed all three original Indy films. Sure it doesn’t have the number of films in its cannon but I think the love is just as strong. Did you see how upset people got at the reboot? They don’t do that for movies they don’t care about. Obviously we will just have to agree to disagree since neither of us can prove either way how a GB3 would do compared to the reboot but I honestly don’t think a single box office analyst or arm chair box office guru would support what you are saying. GB 3 would’ve been huge. Seeing those characters on screen again? ■■■■. I get watery eyed just thinking about it. Again I’ll never be able to prove it but it’s something I know in my bones. To equate ID4 and Jeff Goldblum with Ghostbusters is just a poor analogy/comparison. Independence Day is no where near a classic. It’s a corney '90s film that didn’t need a sequel. Sure it was cool at the time in 1996 but have you seen that film lately? It hasn’t aged well. It still has its fun little moments, but everyone of them revolve around Will Smith.

But yeah like I said we will just to agree to disagree. You raise some interesting points regardless.