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ghostbusters-youtubetrailer5.jpg

The 'Ghostbusters' Trailer Just Made History... With How Much People Love to Shit On It

By Vivian Kane | Miscellaneous | April 29, 2016 |

By Vivian Kane | Miscellaneous | April 29, 2016 |



We’ve already spent more time this week than I’m sure any of us— myself included— cared to, talking about the swarms of angry dudes hating on the new Ghostbusters. I certainly didn’t plan to devote any more words or thoughts to them, but then a new, important revelation came to light today, thanks to Mike Sampson over at Screen Crush. The Ghostbusters trailer (the actual trailer, not the Chris Hemsworth featurette we talked about earlier) has made history. The shittiest kind of history. The kind of history where it is now the most disliked movie trailer ever on YouTube.

As of writing this, the official trailer has just under 510,000 dislikes. That’s out of the 28+ million views, and compared to 204,500 likes. And no matter how you feel about the quality of the trailer itself, I hope all of us with some— like, any— degree of sanity and persepective can recognize that as totally fucking bananas. Sure, you may not like the trailer. Or you may not be looking forward to the reboot at all. But at the very least, I don’t know how anyone can not appreciate certain generous gifts that this trailer bestowed upon us, the world.

By which I obviously mean the following:


Those frames alone should earn the trailer your appreciation, if not your love.

At this point, I would honestly love to live in a world where people just didn’t like this trailer. But that’s not the world we live in. It seems impossible (though so many people do it) to look at this overwhelming hatred of a movie trailer and miss the fact that this outrage is not based in the film or trailer’s quality, but in the gender of its protagonists. Add to that the fact that these women are taking over a classic originally helmed by men. Now, I get the RUINING MY CHILDHOOD feeling, but TMNT or even the new The Muppets that everyone hates didn’t get this sort of attack.

The mods on the YouTube page (or Sony— I don’t know who controls this) have started deleting the worst comments, but a lot of hate, not for the trailer, but for women being the focus of the trailer, still remains. “Feminazi” is being thrown around a lot, as are jokes about Melissa McCarthy’s weight, and the seemingly obligatory reminders that women aren’t funny.

Screen Crush also points out that the list of YouTube’s most disliked videos is made up nearly entirely of women. From Taylor Swift to Rebeca Black and Miley Cyrus (as well as, almost inexplicably, an hour-long video of a woman’s voice singing nursery rhymes and kids’ songs), this is who YouTube viewers hate, and that’s not a damn coincidence. Likewise, the majority of the videos on the list that are made by or feature men are music videos from guys like Justin Bieber— meaning men who have predominantly female audiences.

While 500,000 downvotes is a crazy number, it’s worth noting that that is still less than 2% of the total viewers. And YouTube is a toxic environment, so on other platforms, like Facebook, the numbers are way lower. Still, it’s hard to ignore any instance of this much hate being showered on women to such a disproportionate degree. There’s absolutely no way this movie will be worse than TMNT, or Batman v. Superman, or Fantastic 4. But when women— or any group that has been told their whole lives and for generations before, that they’re fine and accepted as long as they remain in the background— step out on their own, especially as the protagonists of a story that is supposed to belong to men, there’s going to be rage. It’s hard to find ways to fight that, other than by pointing and laughing at their wrongness, and of course the almighty box office dollar. Personally, I can’t wait to give this movie my money. I wanted to anyway, because I’m excited and I hope it will be good, but now every dollar spent to prove these misogyny-swamped basement cretins wrong is just layer upon layer of sweet as hell icing on the shitcake they’re baking.