More Internet Troll Ad Campaigns

I’ve written previously about Paul Feig’s stupid marketing campaign for the Ghostbusters reboot, merging social justice nonsense with intentional efforts to annoy potential moviegoers. That effort bombed so badly that the film earned a $70 million loss, and resulted in Sony handing the keys to the franchise back to originator Ivan Reitman. (Subsequent coverage shows that there will be a new Ghostbusters franchise sequel made, with Jason Reitman at the helm, but with no ties to the Feig 2016 cast or plot lines.) The “get woke, go broke” mantra may be overdone, but it’s not entirely without some basis in fact.

This failure does not seem to have dissuaded would-be marketeers from following in Feig’s dubious footsteps, and so we have a couple new examples in late weeks:

• Disney has planned a live-action Little Mermaid reboot starring black actress Halle Bailey. The Washington Post ran a piece by Brooke Newman claiming there was some sort of backlash, based on the thinnest speculation. The only cite she gives is the hashtag #NotMyAriel, but the mentions there are exclusively virtue-signalers in favor of the casting.
• The latest Terminator franchise (they’re still making those?) has its own baffling anti-Internet-troll marketing blitz, because, wasn’t Sarah Connor supposed to be proof that a Kickass Female Character™️ can make box office bank without resorting to slagging on half their potential audience?

 Usually when an auteur starts a marketing campaign, it's for the widest possible audience. These seem aimed at only social justice warriors. Is this a recipe for success? It seems unlikely.

The Horseshoe Effect: Ghostbusters 2016 Vs. The 2016 Hugo Awards

For comparison:

Aspect	2016 Ghostbusters	Sad/Rabid Puppies 2016 Hugo Awards Nominees
Potential Audience	General moviegoing public	Hugo voters (any member of the World Science Fiction Convention)
Actual Audience	SJWs, bitter feminist division	Old-school science fiction (circa 1930) nostalgiacs, brownshirts
Ham-Handed Entryist(s)	Paul Feig	Vox Day (Theodore Beale), et al.
Genius Bit Of Marketing To The Subgroup	Playing Jezebel, Slate, etc. like a drum	crickets
Why This Backfired	Don't lecture your audience.	The same

More on the 2016 Ghostbusters reboot.

Ghostbusters' Lesson: Don't Insult Your Potential Audience

The first industry piece labeling the Ghostbusters reboot a failure comes from The Hollywood Reporter, noting the film's $70M loss, and rescinding an earlier commitment to a sequel (emboldening mine):

As of Aug. 7, Ghostbusters had earned just under $180 million at the global box office, including $117 million domestic. The film still hasn't opened in a few markets, including France, Japan and Mexico, but box-office experts say it will have trouble getting to $225 million despite a hefty net production budget of $144 million plus a big marketing spend. The studio has said break-even would be $300 million.

Sony hardly is alone in suffering from audience rejection of sequels this summer. But film chief Tom Rothman and his team, along with partner Village Roadshow, had high hopes for launching a live-action Ghostbusters "universe." Now they are preparing for steep losses (think $70 million-plus) and an uncertain future for the franchise.

Sony won't comment on whether it has banished a sequel to the netherworld, but perhaps tellingly, a rep says the studio actively is pursuing an animated Ghostbusters feature that could hit theaters in 2019 and an animated TV series, Ghostbusters: Ecto Force, which is eyeing an early 2018 bow. Both are being guided by Reitman, who firmly is back in charge of the Ghostbusters empire via Ghost Corps., a subsidiary with a mandate to expand the brand across platforms. (It was former Sony film chief Amy Pascal who first embraced Feig's vision for the live-action reboot, not Reitman or Rothman.)

Given the early marketing heavily rested on highly politicized narrowcasting, is anyone surprised by this? It's significant that, in recovering its losses, Sony now expects other, ancillary markets (foreign box office and licensing) to take up the slack, and moreover, has handed the franchise reins back to original creator Ivan Reitman. The lesson here seems to be, take your licks and shut up if you drop a turd on screen. Given Reitman's track record, we can pretty safely assert he won't act on Reporter writer Caryn James' analysis that Ghostbusters wasn't feminist enough, i.e. alienating and loud.

Update 2016-08-14: Brad Torgerson:

Wagging your finger at people is never, ever a winning marketing strategy. Wagging your finger at the crowds is liable to have the crowds showing you a collective finger of their own — and it ‘aint the index finger. Because people like what they like, and they don’t like what they don’t like. De gustibus. You want to freight your product with all kinds of social justice ornamentation? Fine. Just be aware of the fact that you’re putting a stone around that product’s neck. Don’t be shocked when it sinks to the bottom, never to rise. It’s not the audience’s fault. It’s your fault for thinking the audience wanted or needed you to shove your politics up their collective ass.

This, also, is the problem with a good number of religious films and other sorts of crank-ery.

Ghostbusters Box Office Declines, Yet Still Meets Expectations

So the latest Ghostbusters franchise is exceeding studio expectations in its third weekend, bagging $10M, declining to seventh place but not out of the top ten, for a cumulative box office of $106M; likewise, the early reports are that the toys are selling well (though whether that holds up after the cubicle dwellers all have theirs remains an open question). I still don't plan on seeing the thing unless it hits cable or something; Mollie Hemingway's question of whether Sony tanked the film's marketing intentionally, in my mind, remains both relevant and insightful.

You're Entitled To My Opinion: Salon's Ghostbusters Head Fake

This is the second thing I've written about the new Ghostbusters reboot (here, and also here, in passing), which I kind of hope will be the last. I expected the movie would have at least a good opening weekend, which it did at a $46M gross, still not enough to dethrone The Secret Life of Pets. Sony has already committed publicly to a sequel; they could scarcely do otherwise, lest it be seen as an admission of failure. The film seems destined for a precipitous decline in coming weekends, but as Yogi Berra allegedly warned, "It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future." But today, I am not here to discuss the Ghostbusters movie itself (which I have not seen), but a recent Salon story about the gender divide among reviewers of that film.

As of the time of writing, the film’s scores from female reviewers are considerably higher, with 84 percent of women giving the movie a thumbs up. Time’s Stephanie Zacharek comments, “The movie glows with vitality, thanks largely to the performers, who revel in one another’s company.” Meanwhile, the New York Times’ Manohla Dargis writes that it’s “cheerfully silly” and Kate Muir of U.K.’s The Times says it’s a “rollickingly funny delight.”

On the flip side, 77 percent of the critics who gave the film a thumbs down are male. Roger Ebert’s one-time sidekick, Richard Roeper, called it a “horror from start to finish,” while David Rooney of The Hollywood Reporter referred to “Ghostbusters” as a “bust.” That disparity has hampered the film’s reception: Currently, there’s a 10 percentage point difference between male and female opinion on the movie. If reviewing were left up to male critics alone, “Ghostbusters” would have a 74 percent approval rating.

In other words, Salon's Nico Lang holds men accountable for some "right" opinion of a film, i.e. the one she presumably holds. She goes on, not to see if there's a general split by sex in films, but to discover heresy:

These gender gaps were static across the board: On average, men were overrepresented in negative reviews by a six percentage-point margin—with 82.1 percent of “rotten” ratings coming from male critics. These films include “Suffragette” (78 percent of negative reviews came from men), “Julie and Julia” (80 percent), “It’s Complicated” (76 percent), “Hope Springs” (78 percent), “Mamma Mia” (80 percent), and “The Iron Lady” (79 percent). The latter was the only film to receive harsher reviews from female critics, in which Streep played Margaret Thatcher. Just 43 percent of female critics liked it.

“Suffragette” (73 percent Tomatometer):
Negative reviews that came from men: 78 percent
Female critics who liked it: 82 percent

“The Devil Wears Prada” (75 percent):
Negative reviews that came from men: 82 percent
Female critics who liked it: 80 percent

“Julie and Julia” (75 percent):
Negative reviews that came from men: 80 percent
Female critics who liked it: 85 percent

“It’s Complicated” (57 percent):
Negative reviews that came from men: 76 percent
Female critics who liked it: 60 percent

“Hope Springs” (75 percent):
Negative reviews that came from men: 78 percent
Female critics who liked it: 79 percent

“Ricki and the Flash” (65 percent):
Negative reviews that came from men: 85 percent
Female critics who liked it: 76 percent

“The Hours” (81 percent):
Negative reviews that came from men: 97 percent
Female critics who liked it: 97 percent

“Mamma Mia” (54 percent):
Negative reviews that came from men: 80 percent
Female critics who liked it: 60 percent

“August: Osage County” (64 percent):
Negative reviews that came from men: 86 percent
Female critics who liked it: 68 percent

“The Iron Lady” (51 percent):
Negative reviews that came from men: 79 percent
Female critics who liked it: 43 percent

Again: the "correct" opinion, and male haters. (Also notice she does not measure the same thing on each side, i.e. what is the actual percentage difference between genders?) Perhaps one day it will dawn on Ms. Lang and her similarly-inclined friends that men are a large portion of the moviegoing public, too, and are entitled to their opinions as anyone; the old saying about opinions being like assholes still applies. That is not to say that there shouldn't be movies tailored to specific audiences. One of my focuses in that regard is that people who complain of specific underserved markets need to go out and fill them, and reap the rewards — and bear the costs. If the 2016 Ghostbusters goes on to long success, I'll tip my cap; that's how capitalism works. Yet it may come to pass that this one becomes a cult film among women, but not well regarded more broadly, i.e. it won't be the blockbuster the original was. That's fine, too. None of us owes an opinion of a particular work to someone else, save in Stalinist dystopias.

Update 2016-07-22: Adding to the list of the impure is Eileen Jones' surprisingly candid pan at the socialist website, Jacobin. Excerpt:

Don’t believe the hype. The Ghostbusters publicity campaign has used puling fanboy misogyny — which is always worth ignoring — to whip up a furious counter-reaction promoting the film as a feminist cause célèbre.

It’s worked like a charm. Earnest think pieces have excoriated despicable “Ghost Bros” for wrecking the dreams of women everywhere by blaming the female leads when the “the worst trailer ever” was released. Platoons of solemn interviewers have asked Feig how he’s weathering the terrible storm surrounding his film, as if controversy doesn’t typically help a movie’s box office returns.

People forget that the Ghostbusters brouhaha is just a pumped-up variation of the same publicity scam that attended the opening of Bridesmaids, 2011’s “feminist triumph,” a women-centered comedy also directed by Paul Feig and starring Kristen Wiig and Melissa McCarthy in a large female ensemble.

 In that, the overall pre-release publicity stunting of the film reminds me of nothing so much as the original The Blair Witch Project, in which bad editing and cinematography substituted for actual plot and writing, amplified by a relentless and visionary PR campaign that defined "viral" before many of its modern appurtenances existed. Say what you want about Feig as a director, he really seems to understand how to knot together the cultural and business aspects of filmmaking.

"Fandom Is Broken" And Other Silly Ideas

About this:

1. GamerGate = "terrorist hate group"? Grow up. Your definition of "terrorist" is too broad.
2. Re: the Ghostbusters reboot, if you don't have enough funny moments to make a funny trailer, you lose. Also, it's a comedy, but neither the franchise's new masters nor its executrices have any visible skill at that art.
3. OH HAI LET'S PICK A SINGLE RANTING POST AS TYPICAL OF PEOPLE I HATE. Weak.
4. Death threats are always so much bluster. Read The Gift of Fear some time. (They do, however, have some commercial value.)
5. How dare people engage with and have an opinion about books, movies, TV shows, and videogames, and worse, have the temerity to inform their creators. I'm sure most creators would rather their output exist in a vacuum, Emily Dickinson style. Right?
6. I don't know the canon well enough, but Captain America's embrace of Hydra appears to have been a commercialized rape of the character, destroying it for no particular good reason other than sales. You do that, you will hear from the fans, and in some very unpleasant ways.
7. Funny how you failed to mention how it was the SJWs who chased Joss Whedon off Twitter. Why is that? Yes, I know, he claimed afterward that it was a new project whose time he did not wish to split with social media; fine. Nevertheless, it does not excuse the behavior of the People's Front Of Judea, nor does it absolve the author of this piece of pinning the worst excesses exclusively on people he apparently dislikes for other reasons.

Update 2016-06-02: Christopher Landauer elsewhere pointed out Devin Faraci's follow-on post that is so larded with self-contradiction it's hard to tell whether it amounts to self-parody:

Over the years I have written extensively - and with passion - about the need for more representation in our media. About the need for more actors of color in our films, about the need for more queer characters in our stories, about the need for more perspectives behind the scenes to better represent the great diversity of people who love the pop culture we all love. Nothing has changed for me. I still feel that way.

I believe that people should let the decision-makers know that they want more stories featuring underrepresented groups. I believe that the only way to get more representation is to let the suits and the bean counters know that there's an audience for this stuff, to loudly proclaim your willingness to buy tickets or comic books (and then follow up on it by actually buying tickets and comic books). Everyone should let the companies behind the stories we love know that they would like to be included in them.

But the line is crossed when you go from "Disney, I would really like to have a queer princess in one of your cartoons" to "I demand that the writers and directors of Frozen 2 make Elsa canonically queer." You can - and should! - let the higher ups know the kinds of stories you want told. You should not demand that storytellers tell their stories in the ways that you want. 

This strikes me as fundamentally an impossible demand, the idea that once a franchise is in place, it is up to the creators and the creators exclusively to set the story arcs and world. The second quoted graf above stands in stark opposition to the third.

The Cultural Parasite

So the new Ghostbusters trailer came out a few days ago. The distaff casting of the leads has turned into a culture war flashpoint, with its obvious, tedious "girl power" message front and center. Predictably, Salon has slings and arrows for the doubters (an earlier version of the headline apparently called them "angry baby men"). I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that the film itself when released may have funny moments in it, but is not funny in its entirety. This is hard to do when one's form is dictated by Maoist denunciation. That this is not likely to produce good results should come as no surprise, and we can pretty readily predict the form of the destructor when it comes to any ensuing criticism:

Amazing. 😂 by @plebcomics pic.twitter.com/8oUzm6Dpe6

— RIP America (@LibertarianHoe) March 7, 2016

It seems to me there's a common thread here between this reboot and Anita Sarkeesian, and it is the demand to insinuate oneself in and hijack a successful franchise and inject dogma into it for entirely political reasons. The business of making a film or a TV show or a video game are all acts that require financing and courage, two items culture critics such as Sarkeesian notably lack. Such are also, notably, philistines, which is to say they oppose the very process of making art. But there is no guarantee the public will lap up the output of such efforts. I have a rule that if a comedy can't generate enough good material to make me laugh in a trailer, it's not worth seeing, and this appears to be no exception. The problem with the Ghostbusters reboot is precisely that it has been sold as feminist agitprop, and now that the filmgoing public has figured this out (thanks to an uninspiring trailer featuring bored actors and limp deliveries), the search for villains has begun.