The “Honest Trailers” team at Screen Junkies tackled the 2016 “Ghostbusters” reboot in the latest installment of the Emmy-nominated web series, but wisely decided to disable comments on the video.
“Are we sure we wanna do this one?” the narrator says as the video begins. “Fine, we’ll do it. But we’re turning off the comments. You did this to yourself, internet!”
The video then dives headlong into the seemingly endless stream of vicious commentary that the film generated, which it refers to as “a perfect storm of hatred.”
“Don’t waste your time trolling the cast just because they agreed to be in a bad movie,” the narrator says at the video’s end. “You hate it? Well fine, then. Go support something original then.”
Indeed, the trolling of the main cast got so bad that Leslie Jones‘ personal information — including nude photos — was hacked and released online.
The ill will towards the film was not timed around its release, however. As far back as September, director Paul Feig was arguing with Twitter users who blasted him for leading the all-female reboot.
“The idea of shutting comments off was written as a joke that we ultimately wanted to follow through on,” Screen Junkies co-founder and “Honest Trailers” creator Andy Signore told TheWrap. “We thought it might spur some press — you guys asking for a comment clearly proves we were right!”
“But, also, the film just wasn’t as offensive as the toxic reaction it received, and we didn’t want to give that small but overly aggressive audience another platform to spew their hatred on,” he continued. “Its ultimately just a movie. Our fans demanded we do our honest take so we said our piece — now let’s all just move on. And for the record I can’t wait to buy a ticket to Paul Feig‘s next film — we are huge fans.”