Melissa McCarthy Says She Doesn’t ‘Get’ the Hate For Her ‘Ghostbusters’
There might not be a more controversial movie over the last decade than Ghostbusters. (Also known as Ghostbusters: Answer the Call to differentiate it from the original film.) For whatever reason, this reasonably funny reboot of the original became the source of an enormous amount of hatred. Before the movie had premiered, the trailer had gotten downvoted on YouTube so many times it earned the distinction of the most disliked trailer in the history of the internet.
Was 2016’s Ghostbusters — which starred Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, Leslie Jones, and Kate McKinnon — as good as the original? Of course not. Was it deserving a tsunami of online scorn? Also of course not.
Those involved still seem baffled by the whole experience, In a recent interview with Yahoo! about her new movie The Starling, Melissa McCarthy said she still “[doesn’t] get it” — “it” being why the movie became such a lightning rod for online anger. Here was her quote about the film:
There’s no end to stories we can tell, and there’s so many reboots and relaunches and different interpretations, and to say any of them are wrong, I just don’t get it. I don’t get the fight to see who can be the most negative and the most hate-filled. Everybody should be able to tell the story they want to tell. If you don’t want to see it, you don’t have to see it.
It’s not as if Ivan Reitman, Dan Aykroyd, or anyone else involved with the original Ghostbusters came out publicly against Answer the Call. None of the old cast and creators said it was bad, claimed it was made without their approval or support, or that it disrespected the legacy of the franchise. In fact, most of them were involved with 2016’s Ghostbusters, either in front of or behind the camera.
The Starling is now streaming on Netflix. The new Ghostbusters: Afterlife — which is a continuation of the original film franchise and has no connection to 2016’s version — is scheduled to open in theaters on November 19. It will be very interesting to see how it is received, both by fans and at the box office.