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[youtube ratio=”0.5625″ position=”standard” ]Ghostbusters v. Trolls just advanced to round two as the movie’s second official trailer dropped this afternoon, establishing the latest battlefield on which the epic clash between female comedians and The Patriarchy will be fought! The theater of war is brutal, and no one is getting out of this tangle unscathed.
You may have read about the first trailer. It was pretty bad. Melissa McCarthy, who stars in the franchise reboot, admitted that she even thought it was confusing, and alpha nerd Kevin Smith gave it a solid excoriating on his Hollywood Babble On podcast, saying that:
“Whoever cut this trailer needs to be sat down, and I’m not going to call for their job to be taken away from them but they need to be scolded. It could’ve been all men with the same jokes, and it still would have sucked. The trailer’s not strong, and that doesn’t mean the movie’s gonna blow, like again the fucking pedigree of this movie is undeniable. There’s no way all these people involved don’t make a fucking funny, at least watchable fun movie.”
Smith was careful to point out that having men in the trailer telling the exact same joke wouldn’t have helped anything, because he’s aware of the hate the all-female Ghostbusters has been inciting among horrible internet people. The other thing you may have read about the movie’s first trailer is that it is the most disliked trailer in the history of YouTube, currently sitting with more than 800,000 thumbs down.
That kind of negative response is… excessive. No, it’s not a great first look at the movie, but it’s also not the worst looking trailer in the history of Hollywood, either. The last five Adam Sandler movies don’t have that many dislikes combined and he hasn’t made a decent or even respectable picture in at least seven years. So what’s the problem? It’s the women stupid!
The rampant hatred of the trailer has lead a number of film writers to speculate that the first Ghostbusters clip got so much negative feedback because there are a lot pissed off men who don’t want to see ladies busting ghosts. A writer at ScreenCrush even pointed out that hitting the thumbs down button on a Ghostbusters trailer has basically become a little online sport meant to overwhelm the film with bad publicity, “The thumbs down votes aren’t organic, they’re part of a coordinated attack on the film by people who are opposed to its very existence.”
And there’s even clear evidence that the dislikes are coming from a campaign of sorts meant to manufacture the dubious honor of most poorly received trailer of all time, “There have even been reports across the web that angry fans are using bots to artificially drive up the ‘dislikes’ on the trailer. What’s worse, there’s a culture of misogyny and toxicity to YouTube comments that fosters this type of attitude.”
Given all that, it makes sense that as of this afternoon the top comment on the latest Ghostbusters trailer says, “aim for more dislikes than infinite warfare?” (For reference, a new trailer was recently released for the game Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare, and after just 15 days it has racked up more than two million thumbs down, making it the second-most disliked video on all of YouTube.) See, this isn’t about actually disapproving of a movie; it’s about a bunch of people who’ve vowed to attack the project no matter how good or bad the final product ends up being.
So, now the question becomes: Will the misogynists turn out in strong enough numbers to thwart the Feminine Agenda? Will small internet men finally be able to rise up and reclaim Hollywood for the everyjerk who lives like Gollum in comments sections? Will Ghostbusters continue to be the most egregious assault on our culture in the history of time?!?! It took less than a month for the first trailer to clock more than half a million dislikes and become the most hated clip of its kind on YouTube, so let’s see if the trolls still have the juice to keep this anti-lady train running.
The new trailer has been getting a noticeably more positive reception from people, but that doesn’t have to mean a damn thing to the haters. So, do you have what it takes, guys with track pads and angry fingers? Can you get Ghostbusters to overtake “infinite war,” or are you going to let a bunch of girls beat you?
