Earlier today, I was taking a look at Anita Sarkeesian’s Twitter feed when I saw her retweet something from Paul Feig, the director of the new Ghostbusters flick. So, I screenshotted it and posted it to my own feed.

Sargon of Akkad saw it, retweeted it, and then was joined by The Amazing Atheist and AlphaOmegaSin. So, it kind of blew up a little bit. I was most surprised by the number of people who said they had been willing to give the film a chance, before they saw the director shilling for a fraud like Anita. Personally, these are the sorts of people I was counting on when I predicted that the film would indeed be a success when I talked about it on stream a couple weeks ago.

Honestly, I still believe it will at least make its money back, even though most hardcore fans are shitting all over it. I think the movie studio, Columbia (parented by Sony), will end up pushing it over the profitability line somehow. Will it be a mega-hit? No. I never said that. Still, I think predicting an outright bomb is going a little too far. That’s not to say I want it to do well. I don’t, especially after seeing Feig’s blatant support of a woman like Anita. Even though I like to let art speak for itself, no matter who is behind it, his Sarkeesian shilling combined with the lackluster trailer has me wishing for a comeuppance.

Still, I haven’t really done any research on the topic. I’m merely going with my gut. Carey Martell has, though, and I’m going to share some of his conclusions with you all before I turn it over to the #BasedCommentSection.

You’ll notice the majority of the fans are age 25-34. That’s the age group of the kids who grew up watching The Real Ghostbusters cartoon franchise that ran between September 13, 1986 to October 5, 1991. This is the demographic who made Ghostbusters a multi-million dollar franchise. We watched the TV show and convinced our parents to buy us the toys and comic books. We’re the ones Ghostbusters II was created to capitalize on.

Most importantly, we’re the ones who have kept interest in the Ghostbusters franchise alive by buying merchandise like those deluxe action figures Mattel puts out, dressing up at conventions and supporting things like the Ghostbusters board game project that raised $1.5M dollars on Kickstarter.

This demographic is critical for any Ghostbuster reboot. You cannot do a successful reboot without this demographic, because we are the franchise.

You should notice 51% of Ghostbuster fans are male and 49% are female. That’s a nearly 50:50 ratio. So obviously, you would assume any Ghostbusters reboot should star an equal cast of men and women in order to capitalize on the childhood fantasies of an entire generation who all wanted to be Ghostbusters, right?

RIGHT??

Sadly wrong, since the folks at Sony Pictures greenlighted a Ghostbusters reboot on the premise of reversing the gender roles of the original film franchise, with an all female Ghostbuster team and a male secretary who draws boobs on ghosts…

But hey, maybe you are thinking the Ghostbusters reboot could still possibly sell enough box office tickets to recoup its production budget of $154 million and however much they have spent / will spend marketing it (if the marketing budget is standard, it’ll be like 3 times its production budget, so around $462M extra. My guess is Sony is probably $616M into this movie already from the budget and marketing costs alone).

But let’s not pretend. Let’s be real.

2M to 2.2M of Ghostbusters fans have been turned off by the very premise of this reboot. Half the potential audience is just thrown away at the start with a film that is specifically designed to alienate them by entrapping itself in a radical feminist message (we’ll explore why this is true later)…

They are literally trying to “fight the patriarchy” with this movie.

They chose the Ghostbusters film franchise as a vehicle to “fight the patriarchy” with.

-sigh-

I’m trying very hard to refrain from ranting (too much) about how the feminism movement today has been replaced with a twisted, radicalized version of itself which is 99% about women attacking men in order to obtain economic advantages for themselves, rather than about women and men having mutual respect and equal legal rights which was the original goal of feminism…

That’s just a small sampling of his very detailed post. He has hard data to backup these conclusions, so it’s well worth going to his site and examining the whole article. The studio is counting on the Bridesmaids audience to come in and join with the natural Ghostbusters constituency in order to carry the day. The only problem is, they may have pissed off the hardcore backers of the franchise so much that they refuse to come out and support the movie. Bridesmaids did really well, for a niche budget movie. This is counting on $600 million+ to roll into the coffers. Perhaps they’ve bitten off a little more than they can chew?

I’m not going to reverse my prediction just yet, but I will say that after reading Mr. Martell’s analysis and seeing Feig’s blatant disregard for anyone who isn’t a hardcore rad fem, my original thoughts are starting to evolve. We’ll all know the truth soon enough, but what’s the fun in that? Let me know what you think down below. Is this movie going to bomb? Will it just break even? Or do we have a blockbuster on our hands?