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Ghostbusters hatred caused by misogyny?

The trailer for the new Ghostbusters movie has got an enormous amount of backlash. It has been estimated that it breaks the record for the largest amount of dislikes on YouTube for any movie trailer.


Because there's a lot of identity politics behind the production of the movie, and it tries so hard to pander to feminists, obviously the defenders (including many journalists) are claiming that it's hated purely because of rampant misogyny. They say that people hate it only because now the lead characters are female.

But is that really so?

Ghostbusters is a cult classic movie of the 80's. Nobody wanted it to be remade, especially not the people who fondly remember it from their childhood. It doesn't help that the jokes in the trailer are lame, the effects are sub-par for modern standards, and overall it seems highly uninteresting.

But it's not like we don't have something else to compare it to. We can take a movie franchise that's even more of a cult classic: Star Wars. Not only did we get one new Star Wars movie with a female lead, but two! In fact, many commenters were expecting a huge backlash from "misogynists" immediately when the trailers came out. But how well did they do in the end? Well, let's see:



It seems that they were liked quite a lot.

I would posit that if the Ghostbusters movie had had male lead characters, its trailer would have had even less likes than it currently has, rather than more. That's because it wouldn't have an army of feminists trying to defend it. (I am quite certain that a significant portion of those likes in the trailer are from feminists who don't care about the actual quality of the movie, only that it engages in identity politics.)

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