Leslie Jones, who co-starred in 2016’s Ghostbusters reboot, lashed out at the just-announced sequel (that will not include her) as “something Trump would do.”
“So insulting. Like fuck us. We dint count,” Leslie Jones said Saturday. “It’s like something trump would do. (Trump voice) ”Gonna redo ghostbusteeeeers, better with men, will be huge. Those women ain’t ghostbusteeeeers” ugh so annoying. Such a dick move. And I don’t give fuck I’m saying something!!”
As Breitbart News reported earlier this week, Sony has greenlit Ghostbusters 3, a sequel that will ignore the all-female 2016 reboot and pick up where the 1989 Ghostbusters 2 left off.
Also, Leslie Jones is lying. The new film will not feature only men. According to early reports, the movie will star two young men and two young women. There is no word yet on the status of the original cast.
Before we go any further, for contextual purposes, it is important everyone understands just how big of a catastrophe the 2016 Ghostbusters is. This all-female reboot did not just disappoint at the box office, nor did it merely flop…
With a $150 million production budget and a promotion budget that must have hovered around $100 million, the movie Leslie Jones co-starred in is, in every way a movie can be, a total debacle.
On top of losing $70 million (my guess is that it’s much higher), the reboot damaged one of the most cherished brands of the last four decades Worse, Sony had plans for Ghostbusters. Big plans. Massive plans. Plans involving the word “universe” that would involved an all-new film franchise, sequels, prequels, spin-offs, TV, animation, video games, theme parks… You name it, Sony was gunna capital “M” Marvel this sucker.
And it all collapsed because the movie sucked, left a bad taste in everyone’s mouth, and deliberately sought to be politically divisive.
For whatever loony reason, Sony thought it was a good idea to capitalize on a few Internet-jerks angry over the idea of female ghostbusters. Instead of shrugging it off like adults, the advertising and the movie itself blamed all men — you know, the same men who had no problem with the all-female reboot of Ocean’s 11.
Come on, there was no “sexist backlash” against Ghostbusters. A few idiots on the Internet do not amount to a backlash. But Sony believed it could cynically milk some free publicity out of it and stupidly assumed there are enough Social Justice Wokester’s in America to make a $250 million movie profitable.
Worse still, the movie itself opened with an anti-Trump joke and portrayed all its male characters as either evil or stupid. The lumbering story’s central theme was a didactic anti-bullying campaign and, unlike the original, which made an overbearing government the villain, the remake presented the government as a savior.
In other words, everything everyone loved about the original was jettisoned, including its universal appeal and the treating of all of its characters — male and female — with dignity.
So now, Sony wants to do what studios always do after a massive and expensive failure — pretend it didn’t happen and move on.
We have seen this a thousand times. In fact, Sony just jettisoned its The Amazing Spider-Man franchise to cozy up with Marvel. The Spider-Man Homecoming reboot completely ignores the Andrew Garfield franchise.
Universal just rebooted Transformers after Michael’s Bay’s latest flopped. What’s more, Bumblebee does a gender flip by adding a female protagonist (Hailee Stanfeld) and is set in 1987, 20 years before the original franchise launched. The movie is a moderate hit and there was no sexist backlash.
The Fantastic Four, The Dark Knight, Halloween, Star Trek, Casino Royale, Planet of the Apes, the upcoming Terminator reboot … I could go on and on listing franchise reboots that either ignore everything that came before or much of what came before based on audience rejection.
But here’s the thing…
With the possible exception of Tom Cruise’s The Mummy (2017), which was supposed to launch Universal’s carefully planned monster universe and ended up exploding on the launch pad, we have never seen anything like the failure of Leslie Jones’s Ghostbusters reboot. Which means…
Of course Sony has to re-launch the franchise pretending the 2016 reboot never happened. Of course they do!
If they don’t, whatever Ghostbusters comes next will be booed off the screen.
Ahhh, but the spoiled, entitled, talentless Leslie Jones doesn’t care. Based solely on identity politics, based solely on her identity, Jones believes Sony should shit the bed again, should tank one of Moviedom’s greatest brands. It is not enough that Sony already spent a quarter of a billion dollars trying it her way. It is not enough that the $250 million gamble on WokeBusters lost the studio a fortune…
This is like George Clooney getting all pissy about the Batman reboot, or the cast of Halloween 6 raging against the Halloween reboot, or… well, you see my point.
But based solely on her identity and nothing else — nothing involving merit or success, Leslie Jones is entitled to another shot, entitled to respect, entitled to the entire world pretending her debacle was not a debacle.
Sadly, she is not the only one demanding, for politically correct purposes, we all close our eyes and pretend what happened didn’t.
And yes, unintentional or not, you’re essentially rewarding the specific demographics who reacted in the very worst way to the 2016 Ghostbusters reboot with the thing they claimed to want instead of the… horrors… all-female sci-fi comedy. And yet, we have only ourselves to blame. Studios aren’t charities and they tend to want movies that attract moviegoers and make money.
Ignoring the 2016 film is a missed opportunity, Hannah Woodhead argues …. “I think we suffer from this collective sense of nostalgia in film, where we’re always looking to the past rather than the future,” she tells The Hollywood Reporter. “The past is safe. The past is easy.”
McWeeny is hopeful the new film is not actually writing off the 2016 reboot. He wonders if there’s a possibility that something larger is going on that could involve the leading ladies of Feig’s film. “The first thing I heard when they set up shop to get this go-round of ghostbustin’ off the ground, before Feig came onboard even, was that they had a master plan.”
I’m sorry, but despite social media and the news media trying to gaslight us into believing the opposite is true, there just aren’t Social Justice Wokesters out there to make a mainstream film profitable.
Sure, if you narrow-cast on a budget, or if you have gamed the system to where you can pretend Jimmy Kimmel’s audience of less than two million equals a hit, that can be made to work.
But in the real world, the world where you have to appeal to a mass audience, we hate this preachy garbage.
My guess, though, is that Sony will bend to the pressure and either cancel this upcoming sequel or mark it with a hat tip to the all-female crybaby cast.
Unfortunately, this era of Woke McCarthyism is something we are going to have to live with for a while.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.