Some of the leading ladies of the Ghostbuster’s reboot have commented on the internet backlash against their casting in the franchise—a backlash that feels like it’s been going on for maybe a hundred years now, and predates the original film in my mind.
In an interview with Dave Itzkoff at The New York Times, Leslie Jones, Melissa McCarthy, Kate McKinnon, Kristen Wiig, and Paul Feig got together to chat about the movie’s release, and how delicious it feels to destroy people’s childhoods:
JONES To me, the people who are crying about, “This is ruining my childhood,” this movie is not for them anyway.
WIIG They need to probably go to therapy.
McCARTHY I think their childhood was pretty much ruined already. If this broke it, it was pretty fragile to begin with. It is good to remember, it is a tiny, tiny fraction that screams. Normal, healthy people don’t stand outside, saying, “You’re ruining my childhood!” There’s one nut on every corner in every city that does it. But so what? The other 300,000 people in a town aren’t doing that.
A common accusation lobbed against the new Ghostbusters is that redoing the movie with women is a blatant cash grab, and everyone should hang their heads in shame for wanting to make money. Feig says, “I understand, if somebody was remaking The Godfather, I would be like, ‘Wait a minute.’ But when everybody’s like, ‘It’s a cash grab?’ Everything ever made in Hollywood since the beginning of time is a cash grab. That’s why the original Ghostbusters existed. It wasn’t an altruistic thing. Studios make movies to make money, and filmmakers try to make something that will entertain an audience while trying to make money for the studio.”
As tired as everyone involved with this movie is of being asked about this “controversy,” they’re just as tired of being asked about women in movies generally. McKinnon notes the “ingrained sexism that’s just, ‘That’s not going to work because we haven’t seen that before,’”
“Women have been killing it for years,” Jones says. “If it’s not a man in a movie, what else was it going to be?”
And Paul Feig wishes people would understand this remake as part of a norm. “The whole ‘chick-flick’ idea is an excuse for guys not to have to see something. It’s what I consider to be a derogatory title. I try with my movies to go: Look how funny these people are.”
Gladly. Take my money, Ghostbusters.
Image via Getty.