Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Ghostbusters remake

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Posted by Brad Miller (Member # 2) on 05-01-2016, 11:17 AM:

Why the ‘Ghostbusters’ Trailer Is the Most ‘Disliked’ Movie Trailer in YouTube History

Math of the article:

quote:
Justin Bieber’s “Baby” (#1 on the list) has a whopping 6 million thumbs down votes, but that’s on 1.36 billion views for a 226:1 ratio of views to dislikes. Psy’s “Gangnam Style” video (#4 overall) has almost 1.5 million thumbs down on 2.5 billion views for a relatively high ratio of 1,666:1. The Ghostbusters trailer is remarkable in that it has 507,610 dislikes on just 28.7 million views. That’s a staggering 56:1, almost exactly four times the amount of dislikes per view of Bieber’s aforementioned most disliked video on all of YouTube. (By contrast, a trailer for a movie like Captain America: Civil War has a 5,237:1 ratio.) It’s not just that people dislike it, it’s that they’re disliking it at a highly disproportionate rate to other YouTube videos.

Current stats as of this FT post (pay attention to percentage of the likes vs dislikes):

link to story

Full article:

quote:
By Mike Sampson April 29,2016
The first trailer for Paul Feig’s female-led Ghostbusters remake arrived in March of this year and the reaction was almost immediately disappointing. Even among those, like us, who are excited for the Melissa McCarthy and Kristen Wiig film, it was a poorly put together trailer that did little to inspire confidence in the finished product. And then there are those who have been angrily and, at times, violently against the Ghostbusters movie since the original announcement that it would star four women and they really did not like the new trailer. Perhaps as an indicator of exactly how virulent the anger towards the new Ghostbusters film is, the trailer has been “disliked” so many times, it is already the most disliked movie trailer in YouTube history.

The Ghostbusters trailer currently has 507,610 dislikes on YouTube. To put that in perspective, the Fantastic Four trailer from last year has only 20,175 dislikes. The Ridiculous Six trailer, which has an impressive 0% on Rotten Tomatoes, has only 5,803 dislikes. Could Ghostbusters be that much worse than either of those two movies? It’s seems unlikely knowing what we know about both Fantastic Four and Ridiculous Six. What is actually happening is that a certain subset of people on the internet have an unhealthy fixation with hating on the Ghostbusters remake and are teaming up to downvote it into oblivion.

Consider some of the rest of the videos on this playlist, which ranks the Top 100 most “disliked” videos on YouTube (current as of April 16, 2016). With 507,610 thumbs down votes, the Ghostbusters trailer is the most disliked movie trailer in the history of YouTube and currently the only movie trailer that even cracks the Top 100. The only other movie-related videos on the list include two versions of “Let It Go” from Frozen.

Justin Bieber’s “Baby” (#1 on the list) has a whopping 6 million thumbs down votes, but that’s on 1.36 billion views for a 226:1 ratio of views to dislikes. Psy’s “Gangnam Style” video (#4 overall) has almost 1.5 million thumbs down on 2.5 billion views for a relatively high ratio of 1,666:1. The Ghostbusters trailer is remarkable in that it has 507,610 dislikes on just 28.7 million views. That’s a staggering 56:1, almost exactly four times the amount of dislikes per view of Bieber’s aforementioned most disliked video on all of YouTube. (By contrast, a trailer for a movie like Captain America: Civil War has a 5,237:1 ratio.) It’s not just that people dislike it, it’s that they’re disliking it at a highly disproportionate rate to other YouTube videos.

As the inclusion of “Let It Go” might indicate, the majority of the list is filled with songs that were popular but quickly became annoying. Justin Bieber, for example, has 11 of the most disliked videos. But a more telling statistic is that the majority of the videos on the list (59%) star or feature women or female characters. In addition to the Ghostbusters trailer, there’s Miley Cyrus, Katy Perry, Taylor Swift, Nicki Minaj, Madonna, and even Adele. Who hates Adele?!

There is a lot of hatred directed towards the new trailer, primarily because it stars four women (though the haters would have you believe misogyny is not the real driving force behind their invective) and seemingly not at all connected to its quality. Quickly the misogyny began to overwhelm the comments under the Ghostbusters trailer and Sony Pictures was forced to delete many offensive remarks, though it doesn’t take long even now to find comments like, “When are people going to learn that women aren’t funny?“ and “GhostBusters - Fat Dyke Edition”. The dislikes eventually got to a point where it became a game among those who hate the movie and frequently return to watch the numbers grow. When one fan commented, “We made it to 500000 dislikes,” another followed up with an enthusiastic, “Lets [sic] get it to a million!”

And that’s really the bigger problem here. It’s not that people disliked the movie on an organic level. As shown above with Fantastic Four and Ridiculous Six, even when people don’t like a movie they don’t “dislike” it this much. The thumbs down votes aren’t organic, they’re part of a coordinated attack on the film by people who are opposed to its very existence. There have even been reports across the web that angry fans are using bots to artificially drive up the “dislikes” on the trailer. What’s worse, there’s a culture of misogyny and toxicity to YouTube comments that fosters this type of attitude. Just a quick look at the same trailer posted by Sony Pictures to Facebook shows only 12,000 “angry” votes (the Facebook version of the thumbs down “dislike”) on 22 million views.

The good news is that while there are over a half-million “dislikes” on the Ghostbusters trailer, there are still over 27 million people who watched the trailer who either officially liked it or had nothing negative to say about it. So while there may be a vocal minority trying to game the YouTube voting system to bring down a movie with a female cast, they are still the minority.

Sadly, at the rate they are going, it’s not crazy to think the video could reach 1 million dislikes by the time Ghostbusters opens in July. At that point, who knows how much this campaign will have hurt the movie and all this before we have any real idea whether this movie itself is any good.

Posted by Buck Wilson (Member # 5885) on 05-01-2016, 11:33 AM:

This makes me sad. I'm excited for the movie.

Posted by Mike Blakesley (Member # 26) on 05-01-2016, 01:23 PM:

The true agenda of that article is revealed near the end, in this phrase:

quote:
a vocal minority trying to game the YouTube voting system to bring down a movie with a female cast

The dislikes aren't because there's a plot to "bring down a movie with a female cast." The dislikes are because the trailer is lousy.

I have watched the Ghostbusters trailer several times and I think it's a terrible trailer. It just doesn't make the movie look good. The jokes are lame, Melissa McCarthy's same-character-in-a-different-costume shtick is getting old, and the supporting players seem weak in their roles. Plus, the famous theme isn't there; the iconic "siren" of the car isn't there (I was really looking forward to hearing that again) and the whole thing just seems like a retread, not a fresh take.

I really hope the movie is better than this trailer makes it look, but based on what I'm seeing, I think the new "Ghostbusters" could give "Independence Day: Resurgence" serious competition as the biggest disappointment of this summer. I think the summer overall looks fairly weak. Hope I'm wrong.

Posted by Manny Montes (Member # 5639) on 05-01-2016, 01:28 PM:

Interesting article, I think that their speculation that this is a coordinated effort to game the youtube system due to it being "a movie with a female cast" is a bit much though. While I'm sure some of the thumbs down are like that I'm not sure that's the whole story, from the trailer itself the movie looks pretty much like the typical sony money grab. Weak cast, boring script, and from the footage shown at cinemacon there were a lot of people leaving saying "why bother".

Studios have to be very careful when trying to revive past series that are cult hits for this very reason.

Also to indicate that it is clear misogyny due to internet comments is hilarious. Watch any youtube video and you'll find hate against anything, any race, any sex. It's just how the internet works, allow people a mask of anonymity and you'll get a bunch of idiots regardless.

Posted by Mike Blakesley (Member # 26) on 05-01-2016, 08:42 PM:

quote: Manny Montes
the movie looks pretty much like the typical sony money grab. Weak cast, boring script, and from the footage shown at cinemacon there were a lot of people leaving saying "why bother".

Studios have to be very careful when trying to revive past series that are cult hits for this very reason.

I have some of these same sentiments about the Ben-Hur remake...why bother, when the previous one was done so well.

Posted by Rex Oliver (Member # 7593) on 05-02-2016, 03:43 AM:

Remake-Can't we just leave the original movie alone?Most of the remakes are bad!

Posted by Buck Wilson (Member # 5885) on 05-02-2016, 03:19 PM:

I don't understand the hate towards sequels and remakes.

This is a Ghostbusters remake. Are they deleting the original from your memory? From the marketplace? From your DVD rack? Are they replacing it in any way? No. If you don't like it, don't watch it. This is a completely different movie from the original and no one is forcing you to watch it. If you're happy with the original, leave it at that.

I understand that it's an obvious cash grab, but as long as people pay, there is demand, so why would they stop?

Posted by Mike Blakesley (Member # 26) on 05-02-2016, 08:47 PM:

Remakes are fine, when they're done well. The current Disney "Jungle Book" is a great case in point.

The 1959 "Ben-Hur" was itself a remake but improved on the original in spades. The new one looks like a bad CGI action spectacle, from the trailer at least. (I still have some hope for it, but since they've botched all the other biblical-slanted remakes in recent years why should this one be any different?)

I think the hate for Ghostbusters stems from the fact that it IS just an obvious cash grab and just doesn't look very good, and if that's the case it just tarnishes the memory of the original.

Posted by Justin Hamaker (Member # 2165) on 05-02-2016, 10:18 PM:

quote: Mike Blakesley
The dislikes aren't because there's a plot to "bring down a movie with a female cast." The dislikes are because the trailer is lousy.

I think it's probably a combination of factors. The trailer does look bad, but I also think there is a very negative sentiment toward remaking a classic. Unless the finished movie really delivers, I think the internet critics will be falling over themselves to give it bad reviews.

I think a similar thing happened with the movie Gigli. People were so fed up with Ben Affleck/Jennifer Lopez that the movie was destined to get horrible reviews regardless of how it actually was. When you read the reviews it seemed like the 'critics' were trying to one up the last guy with how bad their reviews were. Roger Ebert actually received some flack because his review wasn't negative enough.

I don't think there is a plot to drive-up the dislikes for the Ghostbuster's trailer, but I DO think a certain type of movie fan is going out of their way to dislike this particular one.

Posted by Dennis Benjamin (Member # 1137) on 05-03-2016, 06:42 AM:

quote: Buck Wilson
This is a Ghostbusters remake. Are they deleting the original from your memory? From the marketplace? From your DVD rack? Are they replacing it in any way? No. If you don't like it, don't watch it. This is a completely different movie from the original and no one is forcing you to watch it. If you're happy with the original, leave it at that.

I am noticing a horrible trend though: Once these remakes are made, they tend to run them instead of the orginals on various television networks. Several times in the last few months, I've seen various movie titles on my cable t.v. guide. In the guide it describes the year and cast of the original film. However, when I switch to that channel - they are actually running the crappy remake or "reboot" of the film. This happened enough times, that I let the big cable company know through a complaint e-mail. Never got a reply back. It goes to show though, if there is a film that you really love - get a hold of the blu-ray or dvd - and keep it. As there is some sort of revisionist history going on at least with Cable T.V.

Posted by Buck Wilson (Member # 5885) on 05-03-2016, 04:53 PM:

Fair complaint.

Posted by Mike Blakesley (Member # 26) on 05-03-2016, 06:37 PM:

I think another thing causing "problems" with the Ghostbusters remake is, for years people have been wanting another Ghostbusters, but... with the original cast. So to see this new one with these other people (nothing to do with them being female) kind of lets the air out of the Stay-Puft marshmallow-man balloon.

Posted by Martin McCaffery (Member # 37) on 05-04-2016, 08:14 AM:

quote: Dennis Benjamin
As there is some sort of revisionist history going on at least with Cable T.V.

More likely just sloppy work by the lowest paid person in the cable chain.