Unless you have been living under a rock, you have heard that the new Ghostbusters reboot — which features an all-female team comprising Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, Kate McKinnon, and Leslie Jones — has met a fair amount of backlash.
Watch: the casts of both Ghostbusters happily murder your childhood on Jimmy Kimmel Live
Constance Grady is a senior correspondent on the Culture team for Vox, where since 2016 she has covered books, publishing, gender, celebrity analysis, and theater.
And most of that backlash is sexist, with the trailer earning comments like, “Whose genius idea was it to remake a total guy movie with an all female cast? Good way to lose both audiences,” and, “Women ruin everything.” The most common complaint is, “This movie is destroying my childhood.“
On Wednesday night, the cast of the new Ghostbusters united with the cast of the original 1984 movie on Jimmy Kimmel Live. Kimmel asked why, after sitting through years of pitches for Ghostbusters sequels and reboots and continuations, the original cast gave an all-female Ghostbusters the green light.
“It was only because I knew these girls are funny,” Bill Murray said. “This is a tough movie to pull off,” he added, “and Danny [Aykroyd] and I, and Annie [Potts] and Ernie [Hudson] were just screaming and cheering like we were at a sporting event.”
In front of him, the four new Ghostbusters blushed with the embarrassment that comes with having one of your personal heroes say nice things about you. “When I wake up from my fever dream and this isn’t real, I’m gonna be bummed,” McCarthy mused.
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