I dunno. Let me play Devil's Advocate for a moment.
This film is trying to live up to an incredible legacy among comedy films. It's one of the most well known and beloved franchises in American film culture. I mean, by Zeus' balls, listen to the sheer
ham of its theme song and tell me you don't immediately feel nostalgia? This film was an excuse to get four great comedians in an incredibly silly setting and telling them to go nuts on it.
If this was just "film about ghosts which takes cues from/pays homage to Ghostbusters" would there be as much vitriol toward it as is being expressed now? I mean, is it even really fair to compare it to a film that is so loved, that it has been parroted countless times in just about every form of media for decades? It could very well be a decently produced flick: But it will always pale in the shadow of the giant it's trying to reach toward. So it might just get unfairly treated because of that.
/Devil's Advocate.
In all honesty though, my personal opinion is this is a film that was produced to check off some gender quota boxes
and little else. If you take away the fact that it's set in the Ghostbusters setting, there's nothing there that really screams "I wanted to make this" on the part of anyone there. Every imaginable generic checkbox is ticked off here. "Black lady is crazy and slaps people while screaming like a raving lunatic." Please tell me I'm not the only one who thinks this is a really old and childish joke?
I mean, it's not even that Ghostbusters was a particularly classy film. It was made by and for the proletariat masses. There was a joke in the original about Dan Aykroyd's character getting a hand job/blow job by a ghost in the ghostbusting montage midway through the film.
It was fucking hilarious, mind you, but it was still there.
It doesn't have to be this way either. You could totally make a Ghostbusters B-Team squad comprised entirely of women and then make the film self-aware of that for fun, and have the B-Team take over for the A-Team by following in their footsteps as the A-Team retires. You could do that. That's totally possible.
But I suspect they'll go for the cheap social commentary jokes and "look at the crazy black lady being a crazy black lady" jokes instead. It'll be too busy drowning in hubris to be funny. Because ultimately, what made the original film hilarious was that it was comprised of four lovable losers that fucked up everything they did. They didn't have the "greatest physicists ever" (Mary Sue alert), they had uni drop-outs and borderline conmen.
They were worthless losers who would have been relegated to janitorial duty or fast food services, who instead became comically foolish but surprisingly competent ghostbusters. They were human characters, and very flawed characters. This new ghostbusters, at least by the trailers, totally fails to establish this with our four protagonists, who instead all fall into a range of shitty stereotypes: The flawless woman archetype, the supergenius archetype, the crazy black lady who is only in the film to checkmark a minority quota box archetype, et cetera.
I really,
really hope I'm wrong, because I'd like this film to be better than "gender quota: the movie" but I'm a pessimist by nature, so... Le shrug.
tl;dr: The writing is looking like shit, even if the actors might be able to do the job, and the premise itself is actually something you could do quite well.
