The New ‘Ghostbusters’ Movie has the Most Disliked Trailer on YouTube
An interesting story from ScreenCrush: The trailer for the new Ghostbusters film, released on March 3rd, is currently the most disliked movie trailer in YouTube’s history. At the time of the article’s publishing just three days ago, the video had received 507,610 downvotes; as of today, the count has reached 630,203 and is rapidly rising.
When compared to a list of YouTube’s most disliked videos, the ratio of dislikes to views on the Ghostbusters trailer far exceeds those on any other video. Justin Bieber’s Baby, for example, takes top honors with 6 million dislikes, but that’s on 1.36 billion views, so the ratio of views to dislikes is 226:1. Psy’s Gangnam Style has garnered 2.5 billion views and just under 1.5 million dislikes, putting it at 1,666:1. The Ghostbusters trailer, however, has received 630,000+ dislikes on just 29.9 million views, leaving it at a ratio of 47:1, an incredibly high number. That number is only getting bigger: at the time that the ScreenCrush article was posted, that ratio was 56:1.
The reason for the hate is two-fold. For one, the trailer itself just isn’t that great. The characters and their lines play like someone went down a checklist of tropes and archetypes and made sure all the usual suspects were present: the cool punk-rock girl, the modest and beautiful-yet-brilliant female scientist, the loud black woman yelling religious proclamations, the frumpy-yet-lovable comic relief friend, and a Hemsworth. It all just feels so predictable, and the moments that are supposed to elicit laughter just kind of . . . fall flat.
The trailer has its flaws, yes, but there’s another reason that the trailer has gotten as much hate as it has: the all-male cast has been replaced entirely by women, and that pisses a lot of people off. It doesn’t take much combing through the comments to find some vitriol towards not only the film’s cast, but the people who made it, usually implying that the film is pandering to a culture of political correctness and aggressive feminism by making the film’s leads all female. To that effect, there appears to be a concerted effort by that faction to downvote the video as much as possible, with commenters celebrating the 500k dislike milestone below the video.
In the time it took to write this article, the video’s dislikes went up by over 3,000, from 630,203 to 633,622; If the trend keeps up, the trailer will likely see one million dislikes before its release on July 15th.
What do you think of the trailer and the upcoming film? An unnecessary sequel? A long-overdue reboot of a beloved franchise with a new twist to bring in new fans? Some conspiratorial plot to push feminist ideas onto mainstream culture? Check out the trailer, if you haven’t already seen it, and let me know in the comments below! Also, be sure to check out the full ScreenCrush article, which is linked up top, as it’s an interesting read.
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Bill Tressler
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