Unfortunately, due to the Coronavirus pandemic, we’ll be having to wait until next year before we can finally see Ghostbusters: Afterlife. In the meantime, however, filmmaker Paul Feig has been discussing why the previous Ghostbusters film – the 2016 remake he directed – didn’t quite succeed. According to him in the past, he blamed misogyny for the film’s failure. Now he’s spoken up again about why he thinks Ghostbusters happened to be a failure with audiences.
According to Paul Feig, in a new interview with SiriusXM:
“I think some really brilliant author or research or sociologist needs to write a book about 2016 and how intertwined we were with Hillary and the anti-Hillary movement and it was like just this year…”
He then continued to blame racism for why his Ghostbusters film was a failure with audiences:
“Everyone went to a boiling point. I don’t know if it was having an African American president for 8 years teed them up or something, but they were just ready to explode.”
In fact, he even blamed an old video from Donald Trump for the movie’s failure:
“In 2014 or 2015 when I announced I was going to do it, it started. There’s tape of Donald Trump going like, ‘And now the Ghostbusters are women, what is going on?’”
He concluded his explanation by saying that the movie failed due to misogynists and racists being afraid of women in power.
“It’s crazy how people got nuts about women trying to be in power or being in positions they weren’t normally in. It was an ugly, ugly year,” Feig finished.
Nevertheless, despite what Paul Feig has to say on the matter, the 2016 Ghostbusters is no longer being considered a relevant part of the franchise. The series will be returning to its roots with a direct sequel to the original two films, titled Ghostbusters: Afterlife, on March 5, 2021.