Filmmaker Paul Feig says that Trump supporters made the 2016 Ghostbusters reboot into a topic of political discourse. Ghostbusters, later retitled Ghostbusters: Answer the Call, was directed by Feig and rebooted the iconic 1980s sci-fi horror comedy franchise with an all-female cast that included Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, Kate McKinnon, and Leslie Jones. While plenty of movies get reboots and remakes, 2016’s Ghostbusters was a media nightmare, with people targeting it from the second the movie was announced before a single frame of footage was shot.
During an interview with The Guardian, Feig touched on the rough political landscape that 2016’s Ghostbusters came out in. He noted that the movie’s release during the presidential race between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump made it a lightning rod for controversy, mainly when Donald Trump decided to weigh in on the film on his Instagram in January 2015, shortly after it was announced. Feig points out how many of the worst comments around the Ghostbusters reboot were from Trump supporters, particularly men who seemed to want to fight and argue about something. Feig said:
“The political climate of the time was really weird, with Hillary Clinton running for office in 2016.
There were a lot of dudes looking for a fight.
When I was getting piled on, on Twitter, I’d go back and see who they were. So many were Trump supporters. Then Trump came out against us. He was like: ‘They’re remaking Indiana Jones without Harrison Ford. You can’t do that. And now they’re making Ghostbusters with only women. What’s going on?’ and got all upset.“Everybody went f*cking cannibal. It turned the movie into a political statement, as if to say: ‘If you’re pro-women, you’re going to go see this. If you’re not, then…’ I didn’t think it mattered at all that the main characters were women, but people brought a lot of baggage.”
The Targeted Harassment Campaign Against Ghostbusters
Regardless of what one thinks of 2016’s Ghostbusters, which has more in common with the original 1984 Ghostbusters than the overly reverent legacy sequels Ghostbusters: Afterlife and Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, one can’t deny that the vitriol around the Ghostbusters reboot had nothing to do with the quality of the film. By 2016, there had been plenty of remakes and reboots of beloved 1980s films like Friday the 13th, Footloose, Poltergeist, Conan the Barbarian, and Robocop, to name a few.
Yet, none of those films got the same level of pre-release hatred from fans before the movie came out as Ghostbusters did. The movie was the target of a massive toxic fan campaign before anyone saw a single frame of footage, as evident by Donald Trump’s comments complaining about an all-female cast 16 months before the movie would open in theaters.
The female-led Ghostbusters movie was announced in August 2014, around the same time GamerGate took off. GamerGate was a right-wing backlash against feminism, diversity, and progressivism in video game culture that resulted in a misogynistic online harassment campaign against largely women creators and critics in the video game sphere.
Many of the same talking points and tactics would later be used against 2016’s Ghostbusters, from review bombing to targeted harassment campaigns against the film’s stars, all because some fans did not like the idea that women were playing Ghostbusters. What was created as just a silly comedy and a relaunch of a popular 1980s movie became a toxic tipping point in fandom that we are still seeing the effects of today.
The irony is, while right-wing fans might say they hate movies that are “political,” when it is one that aligns with their political worldviews, they embrace it with open arms. One can see this with Matt Walsh’s “documentary” Am I Racist?, which, despite being overtly political in nature, is given a free pass. And for all their efforts to make 2016’s Ghostbusters look like a flop, it outgrossed both Ghostbusters: Afterlife and Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, which were supposedly what the “fans” wanted. Go woke, go broke? Not really.