Justice

Important Twitter Rant About the New 'Ghostbusters' Film

July 13th 2016

Before it even premiered, the "Ghostbusters" remake has been getting a lot of hate, mostly from male fans of the original who are against seeing their beloved franchise remade with a cast of women. Now that the movie is out, the fan reviews are in, and a quick scan on IMDB reveals that they are not positive.

When Rachel Strolle, a bookseller in Naperville, Illinois, decided to tweet one of these reviews to point out the hypocrisy, she had no idea her tweet would go viral.

"Maybe this is how women feel about the movies where the woman is just the love interest," Strolle comments on a review that complains that "there is not a single male character in here that a young boy can look up to."

As of writing, this tweet has over 13,000 retweets and 15,000 likes.

But Strolle wasn't done.

Her tweets then made a good point about casting for this edition of Ghostbusters.

And as for the argument that there aren't any male characters for "young boys to look up to," Stolle has a counter to that as well.

Oh, and a few more points about women in film.

But in the end, her message is clear.

Strolle tells ATTN: that she's shocked her rant gained so much traction. "My reaction is still, 'WTF is happening?'" she told us, "because as of the time I wrote them I only had about 450 followers and this morning I woke up to the tweet having 13K RTs." She says she has "no idea" how her initial tweet went viral. "I'm still trying to figure that out. It's very puzzling."

She was inspired to rant because, "I was curious as to why there was such a low score on IMDb when the Rotten Tomatoes score is higher." This is likely because anyone can submit an IMDb review, and they do. And the vast majority of those reviewers are male. Men bringing down scores of movies and television starring women isn't a new phenomenon.

In the user ratings report for "Ghostbusters" (2016), 2,666 men aged 30-44 gave the film an average rating of 3.5. By comparison, only 304 women of the same age gave a much higher average rating of 7.

Upon finding the poor IMDB reviews, Strolle felt she had to vent and that "[I] figured some of my friends also felt the same way." Looks like she was right.

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