Is New 'Ghostbusters' Reboot Giving in to Sexist Trolls?
by EG
The reaction to 2016's reboot of Ghostbusters essentially created the discussion of toxic fandom surrounding some franchises. This week, the director of yet another reboot of the movie, Jason Reitman, made some comments that sound disturbingly as if he's trying to cater to the worst of the original movie's fan base. Read on for more.
Jason Reitman wants people to know something about his upcoming Ghostbusters movie: He’s making it for the True Fans. Not fans of Ghostbusters, I hasten to add; instead, he’s apparently aiming it directly at the subset of the movie’s audience that actually believes in a hierarchical structure of fandom that makes such a thing as a “True Fan” (or, for that matter, a “fake fan”) a possibility in the first place.
Talking on the most recent edition of Bill Burr’s Monday Morning Podcast, Reitman went out of his way to reassure those still seemingly traumatized by Paul Feig’s all-female 2016 reboot of the franchise that his movie wouldn’t be anything like that, saying, “I’m not making the Juno of Ghostbusters movies,” referencing his 2007 Ellen Page film centering on a pregnant teenage girl.
"We are in every way trying to go back to original technique and hand the movie back to the fans," said Reitman, noting that his team painstakingly researched techniques used in the 1984 original film, directed by his father Ivan Reitman, for the movie's first teaser.
Let’s put aside, for a second, the hopefully accidental sexism in the Juno reference, which is as likely to be a reference to the tone of the movie as it is the gender of the protagonists and potential swipe at the Feig movie. Although it’s worth remembering that Juno was nominated for four Academy Awards, including best picture, so maybe a Juno version of the franchise wouldn’t be a bad thing.
For that matter, let’s ignore Reitman’s other comments during the same interview that he “consider[s] myself the first Ghostbusters fan” who “want[s] to make a movie for my fellow Ghostbusters fan,” and instead ask this simple question: Why is Reitman saying this? That the 2016 reboot of the franchise underperformed at the box office is hardly a secret, and so some course correction should be expected. But “hand the movie back to the fans” seems a little over the top, at least.
Get the rest of the story at The Hollywood Reporter.
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