by TheBaxter on Wed May 25, 2016 5:02 pm
the most anti-feminist thing about this is the way the studio is pre-emptively blaming sexism for what they are increasingly realizing is going to be a box office flop. it's a self-fulfilling prophecy for them. they've been criticized over and over for not producing strong female roles, not entrusting tentpole blockbuster properties to female casts and female directors, which they blame on audiences not being willing to accept female casts in these kinds of movies. so when they finally make one, and it bombs for completely unrelated reasons, they have a built-in defense for why it flopped. and now, once they realize how it's most likely going to bomb and lose them a bunch of money, they're covering their asses and looking for someone to blame because they're afraid of losing their jobs over the stupid decision to make this movie in the first place. instead of admitting that this project was a bad idea from the beginning (and by beginning, i mean BEFORE they even came up with the idea of using a female cast), they'll just use sexism as a convenient scapegoat.
so let's conveniently shift the blame over to some sexist youtube commenters and film bloggers, instead of accepting the real reasons the movie will fail: 1) the general antipathy towards remaking/rebooting this movie in the first place; the only people who wanted to see another GB film were people who wanted to see the original cast; the idea of rebooting this franchise with a brand new, younger cast was always getting ripped to shreds by internet fanboys, even long before the idea of an all-female cast was a glint in some producer's eye and everyone assumed it would star seth rogen or james franco or channing tatum; 2) the horrible trailers, that first trailer was like cinematic afterbirth, the second trailer was better, but only in the way that vomit is better than diarrhea; and 3) the actual suckiness of the film itself, which is speculative at the moment, but is the only reasonable conclusion to be reached based on the actual footage taken from the trailers themselves. it's possible the film could be ok, and they just happened to pick the crappiest bits out to put in their trailers, but when a comedy film goes two trailers and still can't even find a single funny line or scene to put in there, it doesn't look promising.
the problem is, now the studios have the perfect excuse to never make another film like this again. i'd love to see a big-budget tentpole blockbuster franchise film with a predominantly female cast get made and have box office success. but it has to actually be a good film first and foremost. audiences couldn't give a shit if the cast is male or female, as long as the film is entertaining and funny enough to hold their interest for a couple hours while they shove $20 buckets of popcorn and coke IV's into their gullets. sure there's a small number of people out there sexist enough to refuse to see a film where women are the protagonists, but not enough to hurt the films BO. but instead of looking at all the REAL reasons the movie will fail, they'll home in on that one single solitary fact that it had an all-female cast and just conclude "welp, the american movie-going public is just too sexist to accept an all-female cast in one of these big-budget FX based films, guess we might as well go back to the usual sausage-fests those teenage boys eat up." and in the meantime, anyone who shows any negativity or disinterest in this film now gets to be labeled sexist, nevermind that there are plenty of successful blockbuster franchises, from twilight to the hunger games to divergent to even star wars now, that feature a female in the lead, and nevermind that most of the same people who loathe this remake, were excited about seeing a female in the lead in the new star wars film, or were pushing to have gillian anderson play the next james bond, or whatever. we've got one film with a female cast that bombed, so SEXISM! and everyone who gets manipulated into buying the studio's self-serving, ass-covering BS is just helping them to justify all the future female-centric tentpole films that they'll use this film as an excuse to not get made.
nice to know that women actors are just as fake and money grubbing as the men when it comes to these things
