I have no dog in this fight but Roeper trashed it in his review.

People are saying that this movie is funny. Why didn't they put any of those funny jokes in the trailers? Wouldn't that been the smarter play?

Because people get pissed off when "all the good jokes are in the trailer." Studios can't win.

the suits at Sony are quite high on the prospects for the movie, talking an animated version and an extended edition as well as a franchise that will be "endless" - from slash film:

After much fuss, Paul Feig‘s Ghostbusters finally had its world premiere in Hollywood this past weekend and rolls out to U.S. theaters this coming weekend. Early reviews have been mixed to positive (you can read ours here), and if all goes well, we could be seeing a lot more of the rebooted Ghostbusters in the future. Producer Amy Pascal says the newly revived franchise will be “endless,” which of course is the goal of pretty much every mainstream blockbuster franchise these days.

But before we even get there, we’ll have a longer version of Feig’s Ghostbusters coming our way. The director says Ghostbusters will get an extended home video cut that’ll run 15-17 minutes longer than the theatrical version.



The Hollywood Reporter caught up with Pascal on the Ghostbusters premiere red carpet. “I have waited for this moment for a year!” said the producer. “People are going to love this movie so much that’s they’re going to demand more and more.” Original Ghostbuster Ernie Hudson also sounded quite confident. “It’s great to finally have a film that moves the franchise forward,” he said. “It’ll be something the fans are going to love. I know there’s been a lot of different reactions, but when they see the movie, they’re going to love it.”

The new Ghostbusters was already under fire before it even started shooting, in a large part due to the decision to feature four female leads. The commotion surrounding this movie has only intensified as the release date approaches, but Sony chairman Tom Rothman doesn’t seem spooked. “All that stuff has been great. It’s been great for the movie,” he said. “The movie is a comedy, an entertaining comedy, but it is also now a real important part of the social conversation and you don’t usually get to do both of those things.”

While a Ghostbusters sequel looks likely, Sony hasn’t officially given a green light just yet. The studio has, however, started making other plans to extend that brand. A Ghostbusters animated movie is in development and a Ghostbusters animated TV series, titled Ghostbusters: Ecto Force, is slated to premiere in early 2018. There’s also been talk of a potential spinoffs although it’s unclear how far along that project is at this point.

But before any of that arrives, we’ll get more Ghostbusters in the form of an extended edition. Feig’s Bridesmaids, The Heat, and Spy all have extended cuts for home video, and it sounds like Ghostbusters will follow in their footsteps. “There will be [an extended cut], and it will be a good 15 to 17 minutes longer than the theatrical feature,” Feig told DVD Talk (via The Playlist). In addition, Feig revealed to Collider, there’ll be even more footage released as deleted scenes and bonus features on the DVD/Blu-ray.

Why is there such a discrepancy between the All Critics rating of 78% vs Top Critics 48%?

It's more likely that people are laughing at bad jokes. I heard people laughing at the trailers in the theater.

Oh, the humanity! People laughed at a trailer for a comedy? What is this world coming to?! Think of the children (who are probably going to love it)!

Or people have different tastes.

The snark is getting old.

Same can be said for the 'outrage' but I think both are just getting started

That's not uncommon at all. A little wider than some (which usually settle at a 20% discrepancy) but with only 21 top critic reviews there isn't a ton to go on.

I figure it'll end up around the same as The Prestige, 76% overall rating, 58% top critics.

That's one of the biggest differences I've seen. What I find interesting is that the negative reviews destroy the movie, while the positive ones are lukewarm. Hardly anyone has glowing reviews.

Like I said, it's just interesting.

Top critics should be less likely to let outside bias influence their rating, their job is to review movies, not be social commentators. Bloggers may be more likely to push an agenda to suit what ever side they are on.

It would be if that were true, but a majority of the negative reviews are mostly middle of the road (2 out of 4, C+ range), the few that are most cited destroy it. Almost every movie has an extremely negative review or two, i agree that it's kind of interesting how much people are focusing on them for this title specifically.

I think it's less to do with neutrality and more to do with the fact that some people don't care what the reviewers for sites like Joe's Movie Shack and How Communist Is This Movie have to say, so you can get weighted reviews by notable columnists by looking at the top critics.

However, that doesn't mean that the "top critics" are necessarily more insightful than the non-top critics, they're just the more recognizable names.

Isn't this all par for the course with Feig/McCarthy movies. If you ask any group of people what they think about Bridesmaids half will say it's the funniest movie they've seen in years and the other half will say it's an unfunny POS. Same can be said of The Heat.

I myself fall squarely in the middle. I absolutely hate Bridesmaids, thought The Heat was about average and thought Spy had some incredibly funny stuff. So judging my previous experience with that filmmaking combo I'll most likely, have highly positive things to say about Ghostbusters, dislike it with a passion, or, what a lot of the reviews sound like, I'll find it incredibly average.

Mystery solved regarding the reviews conspiracy theories.

Why is it that the last couple of weeks the "Topic Critics" filter doesn't work? I click on it and it always says "Tomatometer Not Available...".

Anyone else having this issue?

No, what browser are you using?

I think Feig has gotten better with each film. Bridesmaids suffers most from the script, which is rambling and misses the mark a few times. The Heat was a big improvement, being a much tighter film, and Spy took things to even bigger heights.

I doubt Ghostbusters will be as good as Spy, but I'm also willing to bet it's not a cinematic travesty as the male population of the internet would have me believe.

I for one, couldn't stand Bridesmaids. If that's what Feig did with Ghostbusters, I'm going to be very unhappy. I never did see Spy, so I can't comment on that one.

Spy was funny for its target audience though it dragged near the end. By the standards of most big-budget comedies today, it was entertaining. Do I see myself ever watching it again? No, it has fairly disposable laughs.

Love it or hate it, I think both sides could stand to be more mature about it.

Don't know how to explain the dislikes, maybe Fantastic Four fans are more niche than kids who grew up in the 80s watching Ghostbusters. Maybe Superman fans were content to shout down the new movie in forums instead of clicking dislike on youtube. Maybe Ghostbusters has more international appeal to fans who were upset about the reboot, I have no idea how many readers Fantastic Four might reach in the rest of the world. I do know that nearly everybody here was really down on the new movie and I found myself pretty much alone in remaining optimistic that it might be a good movie.

I actually thought the Fantastic Four and BvS trailers were pretty good, whereas I thought the Ghostbusters trailer was confusing and unfunny. The circumstances surrounding the movies are different, as well. A lot of people here wrote off the new movie when young actors were cast, and Johnny Storm was going to be black. Fans lamented that we weren't getting more mature characters, perhaps even set a few decades ago would be good. People thought the tone of BvS was too dark, Superman was too dour, Eisenberg was nothing like the Lex Luthor.

With Ghostbusters, the established canon was being ignored completely, with Ghostbusters 2016, the first two movies and the cartoon, never happened. There was no Venkman, Ray, Egon, Winston. At least FF and BvS was about the characters we know and love, even if this was a new timeline with superficial differences. Look at how the Star Trek reboot has found critical and commercial success, and even some love among TOS fans. Would a new Star Trek movie about an entirely unknown crew, that also erased the history of previous Starships have been as successful? I don't know. Probably not.

With the announcement of a reboot starring a female cast, it became clear that Sony was capitalizing on the name Ghostbusters, while appealing to a different audience. They wanted Ghostbusters fans to fork over the dollars on the name alone, even if the new characters were less relatable. Some of us can take a wait-and-see approach, but that's simply not how fandom on the internet works. Like I said, it's a place of outrage and hyperbole. Every bit of news that doesn't match up perfectly with our preconceived notions and expectations of these characters will spell more and more doom. And we weren't even getting the characters we grew up loving! To be fair, fans have been getting fucked over for years by studios watering down concepts to make things more appealing the mainstream, all while expecting us to blindly pay to see our favorite characters being bastardized.

Social media was quick to jump into the misogyny train and that became the narrative, and sure, there were probably a lot of sexist pieces of shit out there, but my faith in humanity wants me to believe that it was a vocal minority of critical fans. There were plenty of fans like me, who are just as passionate about the original characters as you guys were about the Fantastic Four, who got swept up as being just another sexist neckbeard in his mother's basement, and that's not fair. Then to prove a point, people had to spend inordinate amounts of time pointing out all of the flaws and everything they hated about the first two films, to show that we're wrong to like them but not blindly accept the new film. If I had gone to the Fantastic Four thread and pored through old issues and talked shit about each one, I would have been shouted off of the forum.

But it's easy to hate on sexists, so in the name of defending the movie, some people descended to the vastly immature levels of the sexists they were deriding. Constant insults and sarcasm followed, and when things got heated they could just throw up their hands and say 'I'm not saying all fans are misogynist pieces of shit, just some' and the entire conversation plummeted into the depths of extreme negativity and hostility. This is easily one of the most unpleasant threads I've ever seen on this forum, and it's because people on both sides are acting like children. When it comes to franchise sequels/reboots, superfans are going to be much more critical if the new vision is vastly different from the original vision we fell in love with. So okay, new director, new cast, but if you don't find the new leads funny, you're dismissed as being a sexist. So many times we were told that we'd be okay if the cast looked like Mila Kunis. Is it impossible to not be amused by McCarthy? Of course not, but people were so quick to jump to the sexism argument, that intelligent, respectful discourse was just not possible. Fans could only get defensive, and things would get worse from there.

When I thought FF looked decent enough to give a fair shake, I was desperately alone in that belief. But I never folded my arms and said that you guys were just whiny cry-babies who weren't getting their way, oh, and you're probably racists too! Eventually the movie came out and most critics and audiences agreed that it was crap, but some noted that it wasn't the total disaster some believed it would be. Luckily, nobody really here pointed at me with an "I told you so" attitude, so I thank you guys for that.

So that makes me wonder what about this film brought out the worst in people both supportive and critical. The only thing that makes sense is that a narrative of sexist haters was quickly fashioned, and nobody really is going to speak out that you have to be respectful to sexists. Whereas I couldn't spin something to say purist comic fans were bad people and their opinions should be dismissed. As somebody who doesn't care if a comic book movie is faithful to the source material or not, this experience has helped me empathize with you guys who were quick to be skeptical about early tidbits from movies like FF. While I hope I enjoy BvS when it comes out on home video, I can appreciate why comic fans might have been so disappointed, even if I end up liking it. Either way, I hope people on both sides of the Ghostbusters debate can chill out a bit and learn how to talk about this movie respectfully and objectively.

^ That's an excellent post.
I do have an off-topic question:
So, I'm not a big Trek guy. I don't know any of the specifics of the franchise, but The Next Generation (with Picard) was the first real reboot, right? Did that series acknowledge the original characters, or did it pretend they didn't exist? Same question would apply to any of the other new series in that franchise, but I would imagine by the time most of those came around, acknowledging the previous entities was necessary and mandatory in some way with that particular franchise.

If anything, bringing it back to Ghostbusters talk, would this reboot have any parallels with Star Trek TNG in that sense?

Star Trek: The Next Generation was NOT a reboot. It was a continuation that took place something like 70 or 80 years later. They even had original cast members guest star on some episodes as their original characters (Spock, Scotty, Sarek, and Dr. McCoy in the pilot). The follow up series Deep Space Nine and Voyager took place in the same timeframe or immediately after The Next Generation and were all part of the same continuity. Enterprise was a part of the same continuity, but took place a few years before The Original Series.

None whatsoever.

Star Trek was handled respectfully towards the fans and the franchise. Ghostbusters was the complete opposite.