Paul Feig's 'Ghostbusters' Reboot

Classic!

 

The original Thomas Crown Affair wasn't really a flop or a hit, even though it did win a song Oscar and garnered another nomination.

 

The industry trades are reporting otherwise. Variety reports that the movie will lost "only" $50M, not $70M as the Hollywood Reporter cited, but either way it's a bomb:

Sony’s ‘Ghostbusters’ Loss Likely to Come to About $50 Million, Sources Say »

The original film cost about $4M and made $14M, so for 1968 that was a pretty good-sized hit. By comparison, the original Planet of the Apes cost about $6M but made $33M, so that was a much bigger hit. But a hit is a hit is a hit, though a hit in the 1960s is a different thing than a hit 50 years later.

 

The 2001 Apes had a different plot from the original, though, didn't it?

 

Same core concept, but different. I could say that about 500 remakes that have been done in the last 50 years.

 

The plot was different in the Apes movies, from what I understand. I'm making a distinction between remakes that maintain most of the same basic plot like Ghostbusters and Thomas Crown Affair and remakes that go much further in trying to make a different film than the original. To some degree, 2016 Ghostbusters played it "safe" by sticking to the formula and hoping for the best, but there can be a limit to how much appeal the studio can garner if they aren't doing something noticeably different with the plot like the Wahlberg Apes does.

 

No, there have been straight remakes that have done very well. I'm not sure how much of that modern audiences will put up with today.

 

If Sony was trying to make an edgy picture, using the plot from the original didn't seem like the way to do it. If they gave the audience something new in terms of plot, that would have made the movie stand out more from what was essentially window dressing by using female leads and attendant female bodily function jokes.

 

The only remake I can think of so far this century that wasn't based on an at least moderately successful movie is The Crazies. And that was actually a lot better than the original - which ain't saying a lot, but still.

 

Let's be fair, Ghostbusters II is basically the same plot as well.

 

Didn't see it. Saw Batman and Bill and Ted three times each that year, though.

 

You aren't missing much. I like Batman and Bill and Ted better.

 

There are quite a few American remake movies that were originally foreign films.

 

I did like the Vigo character, wish they would've utilized him more.

 

While the article undoubtedly has plenty of satirical elements, it's not as if it has zero to do with how the guy actually feels. I don't think he thinks all men aren't funny. But how much context does this "satire" (written for 'The Hollywood Reporter") have? Why is Feig responding a full *six years* after the (ridiculous) Hitchens article?

Feig has gone on record with how he feels about gender roles in terms of how it impacted his childhood and life and how it affects his filmmaking. That this article seems to have that same vibe to it is then not surprising. He clearly empathizes with women more than men in many respects. The element of the article that is not ironic or satirical is that its underlying premise is something not completely far removed from how he has expressed he actually feels and thinks.

 

I guess if the main point of the piece is that it's a response to *other* folks making such blanket statements (statements which certainly would deserve a response), the piece just needs more context. The only specific piece he seems to cite is a then-six-year-old piece by an author with rather extremist, harsh opinions on a ton of things.

If the piece is indeed meant to be satirical and funny, then I think he largely failed. As a rather wiseass commenter on that article mentioned, Feig ends up proving his "point" that men aren't funny by writing an unfunny article.

I think blanket statements concerning the potential for humor from one gender or the other are ridiculous and should be rebuked. It could even be done in a humorous, satirical fashion. But Feig's piece isn't funny.

I've read Hitchens's piece and a funny response satirizing Hitchens's bloated piece could be written (and probably would have been more impactful and certainly had more context if it was written in 2007 rather than 2013). But the Feig piece doesn't do it in my opinion.

I would also say that, looking at Feig's own comments about his life and his attitude towards his work, he goes well beyond "both men and women are funny." His work on "Ghostbusters" for instance goes a lot farther towards actually depicting men in the "satirical" fashion that he goes into in that piece he wrote.

 

I have come across a lot of people who don't even know that satire exists, which is why they do not understand it.

 

The difference is that Paul Feig isn't Jonathan Swift, nor has anyone suggested that satire that is not understood by some is therefore "bad" satire.

I'm also not fully convinced that Feig's piece is 100% satirical. It's delivered as satire I suppose, but I suspect Feig is "kidding on the square" a bit with his piece.

 

Let's hope this was the end of that ****ty "reboot" craze we have been in for some time now .................... Yeah right

 

I finally got around to watching the Blu-ray of this tonight, and all I can say is... good god, what a horrible movie. I'm in shock that anybody could put a script together this bad and assume it would be a hit. I expected it to be not-so-great, but it was far worse than that.

It was a terrible, terrible waste of very talented people. I though the CGI VFX were way, way over the top and crazy, some of the composites looked fake as hell, and I didn't believe a single one of the women in their roles. They all seemed like comedians trying to deliver straight lines in an SNL sketch. Surprisingly, I might have liked Leslie Jones most of all.

In the original Ghostbusters, I totally bought Aykroyd and Ramis as the eccentric scientists, and I felt like they had a total handle on their pseudo-scientific babble. But in this movie, I didn't buy the two "scientists" for even a moment. Way too many snappy one-liners crammed in. This has nothing to do with racism or sexism or any ism -- it's just a lack of believability and a huge lack of funny.

Just an awful, awful film made by people who had no regard at all for the audience. It sucked 20 minutes in, and never got much better. I'm in shock that the studio execs actually believed for a moment that this was gonna start a new franchise of multiple sequels.

Haaaaaaaarible. There's a couple of long videos on YouTube that relate more reasons than I could in this space as to why the movie is terrible, but I think they make a lot of their points very well. One of them actually uses some of the Sony-hacked emails to back up the claims there was a lot of internal turmoil on making the film, with a dozen or more different scripts in development and at least four or five different casts that were in the running over the last 7-8 years. It's a huge bloody mess.

Wall Street says the movie basically lost $70M (depending on how you calculate the tax credits) and killed any chances for sequels, plus it helped push Sony chief Amy Pascal out the door (once they realized the movie was probably going to be a bomb), and even reshoots this past May could not save it. It's a monumental example of how to really F up a beloved movie franchise.

 

Amen.