Ghostbusters Should Have Been Left to the Girls

Things that were good while they lasted: Firefly, Ben & Jerry’s Free Cone Day, the first season of Homeland, and now, thinking Ghostbusters would become a female-fronted franchise.

For those who don’t know, last week news broke that in addition to the Paul Feig-directed, woman-led Ghostbusters people have been geeking out about for months, Sony is working on another Ghostbusters film starring an all-male cast. In late January we learned that Feig’s reboot would star Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, Kate McKinnon (called it), and Leslie Jones. The dude version will be produced/directed by brothers Joe and Anthony Russo (Captain America: The Winter Soldier) produced by Channing Tatum (who may star), and possibly also feature Chris Pratt.

Look, it’s not as though I thought that a woman-led Ghostbusters was going to make the franchise a completely female dominated monolith from here on out—that’s unnecessary. It’s just, well, the little high that came from hearing that one of the great geek franchises was going to get a reboot starring a few highly talented folks of my gender is gone. But moreover, the second all-male movie gives the all-girl Ghostbusters a gender problem it didn’t need to have.

Almost immediately many decried the new guy-centric endeavor. And just as quickly rushed to clarify that maybe it wouldn’t technically be an all-male movie, just a movie that would probably star a lot of bros. (A Ghostbusters with dudes—how novel!)

What’s worse is I’ll probably love that brodown! I’m psyched at the idea of Tatum and Pratt getting into the busting business—they’re both fantastic. But that excitement is now necessarily tempered by an inescapable reality: the mere existence of a “guy” Ghostbusters movie and a “girl” Ghostbusters movie sets up an unfortunate dichotomy.

There’s something about the idea of having one film “for women” and one “for men” that’s just gross, even if they’re not meant to be seen that way. (There’s talk the two films will lead to an Avengers-esque crossover.) As Genevieve Koski points out at The Dissolve: “the idea that there is ‘girl entertainment’ and ‘boy entertainment’ is outmoded but annoyingly persistent, based more in advertising opportunities than how most people actually consume entertainment.” That’s true, but the fact that this immediately became the conversation about these two movies demonstrates there are still those who think movies with a lot of men are made for men and movies with a lot of women are made for women, when in fact the average movie-goer would probably just like to see a flick that looks as populated by people of different genders (not to mention races or sexual orientations) as real life.

In fact, the Feig-led Ghostbusters could have been a perfect blind test of this theory. If Feig and co. would have been allowed to finish this one chapter under the auspices of “the Ghostbusters are female this time around,” it could have told us what kind of legs the franchise had with a different set of phantom-chasers. Now it won’t be able to escape being put in competition with the Russo brothers offering.

Why Does It Have to Be All or Nothing?

As a fan and female, while I’m completely psyched for a Wiig/McCarthy/McKinnon/Jones addition to the canon, I never really thought there had to be an all-girl Ghostbusters, specifically. I just wanted a Ghostbusters where there were girls on the team. (We can have the argument about whether Annie Potts’s Janine Melnitz was on the team in the original movies another time.) As with many a nerd property, Ghostbusters just wasn’t very gender balanced the first time around and whenever word started to come around that the franchise might get rebooted it was easy to hope that in a post-“women aren’t funny” world, the answer to “Who ya gonna call?” might not be “four dudes.” When I was eight years old I dressed up as the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man for Halloween because it was easier for me to be that than, say, Peter Venkman and it would be nice if Halloween 2016 had female Ghostbusters costumes that didn’t look like this. (I still think of that Stay Puft costume to be my inaugural drag performance, though.)

But instead of a gender-balanced squad the franchise completely gender-swapped it and we got an all-female team. It maybe shouldn’t have been this way, and not just because these kinds of things tend to cause waves of misandry panic that spread like the clap at Coachella. It maybe shouldn’t have been this way because it would’ve been a more interesting movie. And it would have avoided making Ghostbusters a franchise with a “comes in pink” installment like so many unnecessarily gendered products before it.

And this, unfortunately, is why nearly every conversation about diversity in Hollywood devolves into a frustrating mess. Now that The Heat and Jennifer Lawrence have proven women are bankable, Hollywood has warmed to the idea of putting females in big tentpole films. But for every Wonder Woman or Captain Marvel movie that gets announced, there’s an added level of pressure that if it doesn’t do well, it’s because no one wants to see a female-lead movie. (Robert Downey Jr. does not have this problem.) By creating one Ghostbusters with mostly women and another with mostly men, buying a ticket to one and not the other will inevitably feel like a vote in some stupid cinematic battle of the sexes.

Ghostbusters deserves better than this. Once it was determined that there was going to be a girl-group Ghostbusters it should have been allowed to fly solo. It should have been allowed to see how it did on its own. If it flopped, so be it. But now, even if it makes $100 million opening weekend, its ultimate success will ride on whether it beats the boys. And that’s terrible for both films. This decision has divided the fanbase in a way that’s wholly unnecessary. What will happen if we cross the streams?