LADY GHOSTBUSTERS II: Seven Reasons Birds of Prey Belly-Flopped at the Box Office.

HEH: Hillary Clinton Was The Lady Ghostbusters Of Presidential Candidates.

As they said in the earlier, funnier, original Ghostbusters, choose the form of your destructor.

GOSH, WHO KNEW? Richard Roeper: My fellow Lefty Critics Graded Lady Ghostbusters on a Curve.

LADY GHOSTBUSTERS WAS PERFECT … AT EXPOSING MEDIA BIAS.

Similarly, I can’t say I’ve ever seen a film studio attack its customers the way that Sony did in response to the film’s horrendous trailer and stillborn debut. Not to mention the Hillary endorsement by the movie’s stars – and the studio reportedly forcing Bill Murray’s cameo in the movie via “‘aggressive’ litigation counsel,” aka, rhetorical gunpoint.

REPUBLICANS BUY MOVIE TICKETS TOO, LADY GHOSTBUSTERS DIRECTOR PAUL FEIG: “In these increasingly polarized times, it is undoubtedly tempting for entertainers to pick a side and try to rally their base in order to turn a profit. But it’s still unwise. People on the other side of the political aisle buy stuff too, you know.”

And elephants have very long memories.

MILO SAVAGES LADY GHOSTBUSTERS, dubs it “Teenage Boys With Tits: Here’s My Problem With Ghostbusters.” Actually, he spots lots of problems with it, after taking one for the team and suffering through the movie to write his review:

I’ll skip over the vacuous and incoherent plot. You won’t understand it watching the movie and you won’t understand it reading my summary so who cares. This, unlike any movie I’ve ever seen before, seems to have been conceived entirely out of spite, with the result that its plot is largely irrelevant.

Let’s focus on how this movie will be interrogated by audiences: its style and politics. The weak, Twitter-style feminist quips come off as lame, unfunny, and resentful. This is especially puzzling in light of the women in the original movies, who captured the range of tough broads one finds in New York City.

Janine even acted as a Ghostbuster in the cartoon series, without it being hailed as a revolutionary act of feminist girl power. What we are left with is a movie to help lonely middle-aged women feel better about themselves after being left on the shelf. It’s an overpriced self-esteem device for women betrayed by the lies of third-wave feminism.

Read the whole thing.

Related: “Ghostbusters Busted! The all-female reboot debuts in No 2 at the weekend box office spot with $46m in ticket sales: Although it’s the best debut for a live action comedy in over a year, it’s a disappointing result for the blockbuster that cost Sony $144 million to make and millions more to market, according to Variety.”

LADY GHOSTBUSTERS AND THE DEATH OF COMEDY.

PC kills comedy stone dead every time.

UPDATE (4:58 PM EST): Christian Toto’s Website is stone dead as well — he just emailed to say that he’s changing hosting companies tomorrow.

UPDATE (6:12 PM EST): Site’s back; post bumped.

OR, MAYBE, AS WITH MOST POLITICIZED COMEDIES*, THE ACTUAL PRODUCT STINKS:Lady ‘Ghostbusters’ Is A Perfect Example Of How Internet Movie Ratings Are Broken.

It currently has a dismal 4.6 rating at IMDB.

* On both sides of the aisle. Two words: American Carol.

GAWKER’S GOT A FEVAH, AND THE ONLY PRESCRIPTION IS SHOVING FEMINIST GHOSTBUSTERS OVER THE FINISH LINE:

Shot: The New Ghostbusters Trailer is Here, and Everything Looks Perfect.

—Headline, Gawker-owned i09, March 3, 2016.

Chaser: The New Much-Improved Ghostbusters Trailer Amps Up the Ghostly Action.

—Headline, Gawker-owned i09, yesterday.

Huh — I thought it was perfect the first time. But the new Lady Ghostbusters will be more perfect than perfection itself. Yuuuuge in its perfection. Such perfection like you’ve never seen before, let me tell you.

(Juxtaposition suggested by an Insta-reader, who knew who he was gonna call.)

JIM TREACHER: Hey, Let’s Watch The New Ghostbusters Trailer!

Alas, I did. And I must say, I concur with this viewer’s video response. It’s not quite Mr. Plinkett dissecting the Star Wars prequels shot by shot, but it makes its point, nonetheless.

UPDATE: “Obviously, though, Lady Ghostbusters is still deeply, incredibly problematic. I mean, AYFKM with this trailer?”

DISNEY’S RACE-BAITING REMAKES:

There’s a new remake of Peter Pan called Peter Pan & Wendy, which race-swaps Tinker Bell, which has generated the same controversy as the other race-swaps because people don’t like to see the classic films they grew up watching tampered with. Though this change isn’t nearly as jarring as the bald Blue Fairy, and not nearly as controversial as the other changes to the story that were revealed in the trailer.

There’s been a lot of hype over the forthcoming release of The Little Mermaid, and I’ve seen countless articles claiming, without evidence, that there was “racist backlash” over the casting of Halle Bailey as Ariel the mermaid. These allegations are only by woke liberals on social media immediately linking any criticism of the race swaps to racism.

I have come across articles and social media discussions claiming that the remakes of The Little Mermaid and Pinocchio have been met with a supposed “racist backlash” However, none of these sources provide any concrete evidence of such racism despite my thorough search. Since Bailey’s casting for The Little Mermaid was announced, there have been allegations of a “racist backlash.” However, it seems that this controversy has largely been manufactured by the media. Even HuffPost, in an article from last year discussing the supposed “racist backlash“ the film has received, didn’t even provide a single example of actual racism.

Ever since “Lady Ghostbusters” bombed spectacularly in 2016, Hollywood has gotten plenty of free PR by claiming that wide swatches of their potential audiences are racist, sexist, homophobic, etc. It’s a way to excuse the failure of an otherwise mediocre reboot instead of actually producing something new and creative.

2. Director Paul Feig: ‘Ghostbusters’ Haters are ‘Misogynistic,’ ‘Right-Wing Radio Monsters’

After a large proportion of the population expressed their distaste for the Ghostbuster remake’s trailer, the production team had to work fast in order to turns thing around. The solution? Brand everyone who criticized the remake as a misogynistic right-wing monster.

“[I have been] hit with some of the worst misogynistic stuff in the last two years,” said Feig during a diversity panel in June. “[As] someone coming from a liberal family and hearing right-wing radio for the first time. It’s like, my God, what’s happened? They’re monsters.”

Several other colleagues and collaborators also joined in, with Judd Apatow saying, “I would assume there’s a very large crossover of people who are doubtful Ghostbusters will be great and people excited about the Donald Trump candidacy. I would assume they are the exact same people.”

What we didn’t know at the time was that such shock tactics were going to become de rigueur by Hollywood marketing departments.

GET WOKE, GO BROKE: Terminator: Dark Fate Bombs At The Box Office.

Let’s not beat around the bush, Terminator Dark Fate is an unoriginal disgrace on just about every level. The very fiber of this film comes off as someone who is ashamed that the foundation of this franchise does not fit their current day intersectional feminist worldview, so they decided to change it by repealing and replacing everything they felt was problematic with more progressive friendly elements.

Let’s start with John Connor. The character who is the primary protagonist of the Terminator franchise is killed minutes into the film and is completely removed from the equation only to be replaced by the new hero of Daniella “Dani” Ramos. This is why progressive think tanks are killing cinema and entertainment as we know it. Because in the world of intersectionality, the only thing they see is a white male action star who just doesn’t fit the bill of the modern Hollywood diversity and inclusion agenda so he must be replaced. If you thought it was bad enough that they made John a villain in the last movie, the progressive Gods decided it was time for him to die thus rendering the plot of multiple films completely and utterly useless.

Well, that explains why the filmmakers were issuing insult-the-audience pre-postmortems ala “Lady Ghostbusters” back in July.

TODAY’S FAKE OUTRAGE: Misogynists are angry a woman stars in the next Terminator movie.

They were so angry in 1993 at a woman starring in Terminator 2 that the film grossed $315,000,000 around the world. But that film has an 8.5 rating at IMDB, and four sequels, one TV series, and Skynet-only knows how many video games and other spinoffs later, perhaps that’s the reason why, like “Lady Ghostbusters,” and the Disney Star Wars reboot, its studio has created a cynical way to manipulate potential audiences and/or excuse away a potential box office bust. In 2006, before Twitter existed and Facebook was just getting started, Mark Steyn noted that “The more artful leftie websites have taken to complaining that the religious right deliberately killed [Brokeback Mountain] at the box-office by declining to get mad about it.”

Today, with the virus-like nature of social media, studios can more directly manipulate potential audiences. But there’s only so many times the stunt can work before ticket buyers realize how they’re being played.

GET WOKE, GO BROKE: Cancellation of ‘Boba Fett’ Movie Reveals a Star Wars Franchise in Serious Trouble.

It’s the Lady Ghostbusters syndrome of a studio and its marketing platform of left-leaning film “critics” (read: industry boosters) attacking male fans all over again. To borrow a line from another franchise that also involved George Lucas and Harrison Ford, Kathleen Kennedy chose…poorly.

BEN SHAPIRO: No, Star Wars Isn’t Failing Because Of Hateful Trolls. It’s Failing Because Kathleen Kennedy Has Done A Garbage Job.

As Ace of Spades writes, “I do not expect Star Wars fans will enjoy being called sexist, racist, backwards and deserving of eternal defeat from the company that hopes to sell them tickets in the future. Hey bigots, racists, sexists and manbabies, buy tickets for our movies or else.”

Get woke, go broke. Insulting the audience worked out just swell for both Lady Ghostbusters – and Lady Clinton.

ANSWERS TO QUESTIONS NO ONE IS ASKING: “Why Gender-Swapped ‘Ocean’s 8’ Has Avoided the ‘Ghostbusters’ Trolls,” asks the Hollywood Reporter, smugly dismissing half of the industry’s potential domestic audience as being insufficiently woke “trolls.”

Perhaps because unlike Lady Ghostbusters, which seen as an oncoming train wreck long before it hit the screens, Ocean’s 8 is getting surprisingly good early reviews.

Update: Sonny Bunch, who also gave Ocean’s 8 a positive review (“the best date movie of the summer”) at the Washington Free Beacon tweets in response to the Hollywood Reporter’s headline, “Because a) the movie was good, 2) the director didn’t go out of his way to antagonize fans, and d) the new Ocean’s movie felt like an Ocean’s movie while 2016 Ghostbusters felt nothing like either of the Ghostbusters films that came before it.”

IS THE LAST JEDI UNDERPERFORMING? Is There a Backlash Against It?

Only Harrison Ford’s surprisingly charismatic performance made The Force Awakens watchable, and (spoiler alert!) his character was killed off two-thirds of the way through, Ben Kenobi-style. Rogue One seemed like much ado about nothing, and had few sympathetic characters. When the bad guys, a CGI Peter Cushing and Ben Mendelsohn’s beleaguered bureaucrat Orson Krennic were the most interesting characters in a movie, something has gone wrong in the writing and/or casting. That coupled with the ewok-esque Porg in the The Last Jedi trailer and all the Lady Ghostbusters-esque feminist hot takes circulating on its opening weekend did not give me the urge to rush and be first in line to see it. Not to mention its ever-dropping fan-to-critics ratio at Rotten Tomatoes. How about you?

HILLARY CLINTON POLITICIZES WONDER WOMAN, SAYING SHE RELATES TO ‘STRONG WOMAN SAVING WORLD FROM DISASTER:’

“Now I haven’t seen Wonder Woman yet, but I’m going to, in part because it’s directed by the fabulous Patty Jenkins.

“But something tells me that a movie about a strong, powerful woman fighting to save the world from a massive international disaster is right up my alley.”

A source at Warner Brothers, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Heat Street: “It’s great that Hillary Clinton will see the movie but her remarks aren’t particularly helpful and our publicity team certainly won’t be spreading them about.

“Wonder Woman doesn’t need Hillary Clinton’s endorsement—it will make $250 million by the end of this week. We’re anxious to keep  politics out of Wonder Woman any way we can.

Translation: STFU Hillary – everyone at Time-Warner-CNN-HBO will vote for you if you run again, but in the meantime, we really don’t want the hyper-politicized debacle that sank Columbia’s Lady Ghostbusters last year. Please.

NOSTALGIA FOR THE DAYS OF MASS MEDIA: Television’s Anniversary Frenzy — After the success of O.J. Simpson shows, TV producers comb history for material; L.A. riots, death of Princess Diana, Monica Lewinsky scandal set for big play.

No wonder TV is obsessed with nineties nostalgia; it was the last time America had anything approaching a unified culture, before the World Wide Web dramatically accelerated what Alvin Toffler dubbed the “demassification” of media in his 1980 book, The Third Wave. (And subsequently gave rise to social media, which quickly became a weaponized platform with the Two-Minute Hate of the day.)

It’s TV’s equivalent of the movie industry glomming onto mass media-era franchises such as Batman, Star Wars, Star Trek, and James Bond, to keep an otherwise splintered audience returning to theaters to reduce the crapshoot odds of movies that each costs hundreds of millions of dollars to make. (And why Sony’s alienating huge swatches of potential moviegoers by trolling them during the rollout of Lady Ghostbusters was so stupid.)

Of course, these days, it isn’t only the Web that’s fracturing American culture.

CHRISTIAN TOTO: Bushwick Trashes Southerners as Racist Killers.

The thriller, which enjoyed a cushy spot in the current Sundance Film Festival lineup, leans on the notion that Texans want to secede from the country. That’s so 2016.

Today, it’s Californians who crave just that following the improbable Election Day victory of Donald Trump. Haven’t you heard of Calexit?

The film doesn’t just miss the cultural mood, though. It’s yet another cheap shot at southern America. “Bushwick,” according to early reports, paints the secessionist movement as racist, violent and willing to indiscriminately kill anyone who doesn’t believe in their cause.

Maybe the best thing you could say is that at least it isn’t another reboot, superhero origin story, or Lady Ghostbusters.

CONFIRMED: HOLLYWOOD STILL OFFICIALLY BANKRUPT OF NEW IDEAS. Rebel Wilson to Star in Gender-Flipped ‘Dirty Rotten Scoundrels’ Remake.

Coming hot on the high heels of the Lady Ghostbusters box office misfire and the upcoming remake of Splash with Channing Tatum in the Daryl Hannah role. One of the themes of Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, Peter Biskind’s 1998 history, and its accompanying documentary of the young Turks who bested (for a time) the Hollywood studio system is that in the 1960s, Hollywood’s old guard, utterly obsessed with producing another hit the size of 1965’s The Sound of Music, pumped out inferior musical after inferior musical.

As Wikipedia notes, Hollywood “produced a series of musical flops in the late 1960s and early 1970s which appeared to seriously misjudge public taste. The commercially and/or critically unsuccessful films included Camelot, Finian’s Rainbow, Hello Dolly!, Sweet Charity, Doctor Dolittle, Star!, Darling Lili, Goodbye, Mr. Chips, Paint Your Wagon, Song of Norway, On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, Man of La Mancha, Lost Horizon and Mame. Collectively and individually these failures crippled several of the major studios.” Did American audiences’ tastes change in post-JFK ‘60s (see also: massively growing popularity of rock music during that period), or were they turned off by obviously inferior product? It’s likely it was a combination of both, but there’s a reason why MGM, which dominated the genre in the 1950s, imploded by the end of the following decade, and it became much rarer for movie characters in general to suddenly burst into song with invisible orchestras accompanying them.

This time around, it’s a different sort of prewar industry nostalgia — an obsession with political correctness, a byproduct of Germany’s 1920s Weimar-era Frankfurt School — rather than swinging big bands and Fred Astaire-style dancing that’s driving this Hollywood trend. But will all of the gender-flipping, endless cast-in-the-mold superhero movies, and the rest of Hollywood’s increasingly limited genre options produce a similar sea change in the industry as with that of the late ‘60s? for the sake of the audience (remember them?) it could certainly use it.

WASHINGTON FREE BEACON: 2016 Man Of The Year: American Men.

In the year 2016, men did so much winning they were dangerously close to getting sick from it. First, men handed the keys to the Oval Office to one Donald Trump, preserving a glass ceiling established by their patriarchal forebears in 1776. Despite dire warning that “Women are defeating Donald Trump,” and political maps showing “Crooked” Hillary Clinton winning 458 electoral votes in an all-female electorate, the votes of men ended up proving decisive and a much better barometer for the final election results. An all-male electorate would have given Donald Trump 350 electoral votes—he ended up winning 306.

Even in defeat, men managed to win consolation prizes. Men were so accustomed to winning that the Clinton campaign paid them more than female staffers, as the Washington Free Beacon reported last year.

Heh. Then there’s the lady Ghostbusters. . . .

COME BACK DARYL HANNAH, ALL IS FORGIVEN: WOAH! ‘Splash’ Remake Will Feature Channing Tatum as the ‘Merman.’

Will this film make Lady Ghostbusters look like the second coming of Citizen Kane? 21st century Hollywood increasingly resembles the last exhausted days of the old studio system in the late 1960s — but are there any Easy Riders and Raging Bulls on the horizon to lead the revolution this time around?