‘Ghostbusters’ Is a Perfect Example of How Internet Movie Ratings Are Broken(fivethirtyeight.com) |
‘Ghostbusters’ Is a Perfect Example of How Internet Movie Ratings Are Broken(fivethirtyeight.com) |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3ugHP-yZXw
Just bad.
There are a lot of bad movies, but this one walks around in the corpse of a much loved and nostalgic intellectual property that a bunch of people wanted. They got that.
Is this really about sexism?
This pattern has shown up a lot recently when an intellectual property is used by something that the original audience doesn't fit into (e.g. the last fable game that got canceled). It's a pretty silly use of an IP - the original audience is where the value comes from.
Maybe it won't be your type of humor, but this is not a bad movie in any way. People are just rating the movie without seeing it, which is pretty stupid in the first place. Because of that I expect the score to be much higher, hopefully a lot of people won't listen to the haters and see for themselves.
- Sometimes the trailer is great, and the movie sucks.
- Sometimes the trailer sucks, and the movie is great.
- Sometimes the trailer sucks, and the movie sucks for totally different reasons
But very rarely do I see a trailer, and then watch the movie and think "oh yeah, the trailer captured that pretty well".
The fact that the trailer looks bad (and it does!), tells me very little about what the movie will be like, except for highlighting which actors are in it, and triggering my personal responses to those actors (I'm personally not a fan of Melissa McCarthy).
[edited to add, because I forgot]
> Is this really about sexism?
The fact that people don't like the trailer? No.
The fact that so many people are going out of their way to rip into a movie they haven't seen, in ways that are more caustic than they would typically be for an unsatisfying reboot/sequel that hadn't switch the gender roles? Yes, I think that is based on sexism.
it's not a thing about women leads, it's that it looks
really bad in a way the original isn't
But if there are 12,000 reviews when the film isn't out in cinemas yet? That sounds like a symptom of activism by people who haven't seen the film.
> More specifically, a vocal portion of men on the internet — shall we say — go out of their way to make their voices heard when it comes to judging entertainment aimed at women, and that appears to be happening with the new “Ghostbusters.”
The thing with the new Ghostbusters has nothing to do with them being women. I'd see Bridesmaids 2 or any other comedy with Kristen Wiig (probably have), and I like Paul Feig fine.
The problem with the new Ghostbusters is that it's not Ghostbusters, not that it's necessarily a bad comedy.
The old Ghostbusters is shot and built up as a dark disaster movie, that just happens to be really funny. The new one is a Paul Feig movie (again, not knocking). It doesn't fit.
I noticed the same thing in the last season of Veep when Ianucci left. Instead of it shot more like an Office-type documentary (without the interviews, like its predecessor The Thick of It), if you look at the Christmas episode (of Veep) as the clearest example, it's shot like any other honestly mediocre sitcom, with saturated colors and honestly phoned in jokes.
Sorry about the tirade, but as a guy who does like good female media (Broad City and Lady Dynamite are my latest favorites), seeing this argument be made with terrible examples is unfortunate.
Nowadays, people always try to find ways to be offended. A women-led movie got bad ratings? It must be the patriarchy! Nobody wonders if it might have been just a bad movie, as I, as a man, also enjoy women-led movies (I mean movies in the cinemas, not what you think :P). Hoewever, the new Ghostbusters just looks like a big horrible painful joke, and that's why the ratings tanked.
Given it's so hard to even assess statistically, how many men are among movie raters, this entire article stands on weak feet.
What I do have two problems with is the framing of this article when it comes to the new Ghostbusters film. This quote is a useful starting point for looking at those problems:
"More specifically, a vocal portion of men on the internet — shall we say — go out of their way to make their voices heard when it comes to judging entertainment aimed at women"
First of all, is the new Ghostbusters film meant to be aimed at women? If you look at it at a superficial level perhaps. To me, when you take on a beloved film franchise, you should make something that stays true to the spirit of the earlier films. The earlier Ghostbusters films have appeal across the board, why can't the new film have the same?
Secondly, the issue people are having with the Ghostbusters reboot is not really because all the new Ghostbusters are female. I, for one, think it was a good idea to do so, as it provided something new, and could have helped it to break from conventions whilst still providing something recognisable as a Ghostbusters film. The main problem people have with the film (and yes, they are just basing it on trailers at this point), is that it appears to be a generic, formulaic comedy with Ghostbusters dressing. For example, with the 'sassy black lady' Ghostbuster, the vast majority of the backlash isn't because she's a woman, the majority of the backlash is because she's playing a hackneyed stereotype. There were other parts of the trailers that were similarly paint-by-numbers Hollywood comedy.
Perhaps the trailers did the film a great disservice and there are better moments to be found in the film itself, but early impressions are not too great IMO.
The previews I've seen of the reboot present like schlock; some writing-by-committee mess. Based on my recent disappointment watching Finding Dory, I suppose muddled writing to be a common affliction in Hollywood, even for the top studios.
I do wonder how the review sites could allow reviews for a movie that isn't released yet, seems the few prerelease viewers isn't worth the chance of being gamed(or guarantee?)
It matches your movie ratings against the rest of the users, selecting the ones with a highest coincidence.
Then you can discover unseen films highly rated by people with, allegedly, your same taste.
I also found Tastekid http://www.tastekid.com/ and FilmFish https://www.film-fish.com/ quite accurate.
IMDB: Men made 7779 votes with average 7.7, women made 2881 votes with average 7.9
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3398268/ratings-male
That is 0.2 points difference. If we look at ponyo, the difference is even less, with 0.1 points difference. If there is a bias, it is not exactly tanking the rating, and someone would have work hard to identify if its because women rate women-led movies higher than average, or males who rate it lower.
To some extent it's the nature of a polarising topic. It's just that when it's a male/female split, it's easier to detect and analyse, so it's easy to build an article around.
The argument here is when men post internet reviews of "female oriented films", they tend to be far more critical than women are of "male oriented films". And in this case at least, (based on people who probably haven't seen the movie) men are more likely to post negative reviews of "female movies" than women are to post positive reviews.
So, to use your example, Internet meta-scores for rom-coms are not very helpful. Sure, if your fiancee wants to see one, you can work out how much you're going to hate it based on how badly other men reviewed it, but if she wants to go see one with her sister, then the internet scores tell her almost nothing. She really wants to know "do people who normally like rom-coms like this movie?" but she gets to see a relatively meaningless "5 out of 10" (based on 10 women averaging 9/10, and 20 men averaging 3/10)
I see a few overlapping effects here:
1) Aggregators like Tomatometer rank based on broad appeal. That's why Toy Story is one of the highest scored of all time (if you don't like Toy Story, you're dead inside), and Fight Club can be beloved to many but still not A grade.
2) Audiences are slowly getting tired of cynical reboots. Sure, I understand the harsh reality that means Hollywood has to play as risk averse as possible, and that recycling beloved IP has slightly-better-than break even results on average, but you can't expect movie watchers to gush over story retreads.
3) Yes, the loudest and most obnoxious voices on the internet are also the ones who will go to the most trouble to tank your reviews. This is not specific to movies. The fact that men are doing this for Ghostbusters does not reveal an inherent misogyny overall, just that said mysoginistic neckbeards are more likely to invest their time in trolling the internet (the 4chan effect).
I have no trouble with an all female lead cast. I just wish they didn't waste all that potential on such a crappy regurgitation.
The internet matters. A cultural consensus has formed and that means a lot of people won't see this movie because the internet "decided" it was bad before anyone had seen it. The way I see it, a small number of overtly mysogynist trolls exploited a widespread subtle cultural mysogyny to tank a movie.
The author shows it with the gender of the voters, but it would very probably have been the same with IQ, education level, zipcode, country, income level, etc
If you look at the gender breakdown on imdb for movies that have been out for a while (meaning that people have actually have had the time to watch them), it seems like the differences between the genders are nowhere near as big as for the new ghostbusters movie. The original Ghostbusters for example is 7.8 (m) vs 7.6 (f) [0]. It doesn't look like imdb provides the gender breakdown of votes in their publicly available dataset[1], but it would be interesting to see someone preform a more rigorous analysis (than me looking at movies I can remember at the top of my head).
I blindly clicked because of fivethirtyeight in the url.
"we blame men who obviously didn't even see the movie, don't ask us how we know".
Yes. and Im one of those men. Maybe, just maybe STOP marketing those 'women shows' to men?
Remember recent Deadpool marketing campaign around Valentines Day painting it as a romantic comedy? This is what most 'movies and shows aimed at women' do, because they just cant let of the male market $$. "Hey go watch this cool new SciFi movie" never mentions its a Urban fantasy romance novel with 70% screen time taken by woman protagonist crying on someones shoulder.
Music Industry and Film Industry have essentially just become about personalities and big money. They can peddle garbage because everyone buys it.
I just hope that books are not next because that is all that remains of quality entertainment.
Less popular ones include those listed at http://the-artifice.com/best-foreign-films-last-15-years/ , like Run Lola Run/Lola rennt, Noi the Albino/Nói albínói, Moolaadé, Second Skin/Segunda Piel and The Celebration/Festen.
No Hollywood film has covered female genital mutilation, which is the topic of Moolaadé, and Festen is part of the Dogme 95 movement,"to create filmmaking based on the traditional values of story, acting, and theme, and excluding the use of elaborate special effects or technology."
There's also Russian Ark/Русский ковчег, which is a single, uninterrupted, 87-minute take through centuries of Russian history while going through the Winter Palace at the Hermitage Museum. Or any number of other lists of notable foreign films, like http://www.salon.com/2015/01/24/7_must_see_foreign_films_tha... or http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/news-bfi/lists/10-great-f... .
To give a counterexample, what about Memento? What had you seen before Terminator 2 that was like Memento?
I find it funny how most of people that discredit the OP conclusion also thinks they are right when they are in the opposite situation. I don't see you Bros complaining when Hollywood whitewash history.
And last, when did you guys started to think that the "old" stuff is yours? They have legally owners, and they can change to fit or create a better history/world (and some guys like you keep thinking in ways to put it worse), like star wars and the woman and black as main characters.
I'm not sure what you mean when you say "someone stole" the idea of Rocky for Rocky IV. Sly both wrote and directed that. It's as regular a sequel as anything.
> I find it funny how most of people that discredit the OP conclusion also thinks they are right when they are in the opposite situation. I don't see you Bros complaining when Hollywood whitewash history.
I explicitly said that I'm not discrediting OPs conclusion, I however did not agree with how they arrived there.
The collective "Bro"-thing I don't feel worthy of responding to.
> And last, when did you guys started to think that the "old" stuff is yours? They have legally owners, and they can change to fit or create a better history/world (and some guys like you keep thinking in ways to put it worse), like star wars and the woman and black as main characters.
I can't answer for "us guys", only for me, but I have no problem with them doing whatever they want with Ghostbusters. All I am saying is that the reviews in this specific case isn't about sexism, but the movie not being at all relatable to the original one(s) in tone. Nothing to do with gender. As much right as they have to make the movie, the fans of the original have a right to opinions on it, without it being sexism, simply because the new characters happen to be women.
Personally I liked the new Star Wars, but it's entirely beside the point, but since you brought it up: SW:TFA was so true to SW:ANH that I'm inclined to call it a true remake, much in how Interstellar worked as an homage/rehash of 2001 with slight twists. I happened to like that one too.
No, it is not. Print roles as male only that is mysogenic. Comedic lead and scientists are only typically male roles because they are - and a lot of freak White guys are trying to "fight hard" to prevent that móveis and the internet changes it.