What If The Ghostbusters Marketing Is Deliberately Bad, In Order to Controversialize It?

Crazy idea? Not really. Note that when Obama or Hillary faces a disclosure of bad facts, they immediately controversialize those facts -- politicize them -- because it's easier to deal with a political fight than bad facts.

What if Ghostbusters is an awful, awful movie and the only possible remaining marketing play is to controversialize it so at least the smallish cadre of feminists in the country is guilt-tripped into seeing it, as Christians are routinely guilt-tripped into seeing less-than-stellar fare?

I thought this was a clickbait article. I still sort of think it's clickbait. But I also think it's right.

Sometimes you can be both right and clickable.

Everyone knows how to sell an identity-politics food fight -- but no one really knows how to sell a piece-of-shit movie.

Interesting: The development hell of Ghostbusters 3 that led to the fake female Ghostbusters movie.

Turns out Sony head Amy Pascal was determined to make all-female movies -- she pushed the idea of a Spider-Woman movie, and wanted to do a movie about an all-female superhero team, which she intended to have the name, get this, Glass Ceiling.

When that failed (in development, I mean), Pascal had the idea to make the Ghostbusters her beloved all-female superhero team.

This video claims that Mollie Hemingway is exactly right-- the studio knows this movie is a disaster and has seized upon the idea of selling it as identity politics exploitation in order to limit the damage of its terribleness. The specific claim is that Sony heavily moderates the comments in its YouTube channel trailers for the film, and while they delete strong and persuasive criticism of the trailers -- especially from women -- they make sure they leave intact over-the-top racist and sexist comments. To, it seems, suggest that the only criticisms of this movie are illegitimate and nasty.

I have no idea if that's true, obviously.

posted by Ace at 11:21 AM

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