This reminds me of an interview I heard with Max Brooks a while back on NPR. He was talking about someone saying he wasn’t really Jewish because his mother was not Jewish and that “Jewishness” goes through the mothers line.
He replied by saying, “I’m Jewish enough for Auswitch.” That to me is all that needs to be said on the issue.
I’m sure it will be a roaring success.
After all, just think of how successful the all-girl Ghostbusters remake was!
…the “all-girl” Ghostbusters remake (128 million domestic to a production budget of 144 million) was arguably more successful than the “all-guy” remake Star Trek Beyond (158 million domestic to a production budget of 185 million, released a week later), yet for some reason people don’t run around every time there is a movie with a male lead saying things like “just think of how successful the all-guy Star Trek remake was!”
Also, Oceans 8, the all female Oceans 11 remake did well enough.
Because only an idiot would use the term “all-[gender] remake” to describe a remake that uses the same genders as the source material.
For example, there’s a new Little Women coming out at the end of this year. Notice how I didn’t say “a new all-female Little Women” because that would be a stupid thing to say. Further, if someone made an all-male version of Little Women, and it flopped at the box office, it would indeed be (rightly) cited as evidence that gender swapping from female to male might not be the brightest idea.
Also, the last two Star Trek films have received PLENTY of criticism.
When was there ever an all-girl Ghostbusters? Was it a prequel to the 2016 movie, set when they were still children?
…well as I did use the term “all-[gender] remake” to describe a remake that uses the same genders as the source material, and you know that I did that because you quoted me, then you are calling me an idiot then.
That isn’t very nice of you.
Who decided on this “remake” rule? I’ve never seen that before. Did you invent that rule? Because if you did then I don’t see why I should have to follow it. I’m going to call the original Ghostbusters the “all-male Ghostbusters”: does that violate that rule?
Why? Was it the gender-swap (which, in the hands of an outstanding production team, could actually make it work), or was it something else?
LOL. You never get people dropping into threads making snarky comments about “how successful that Star Trek movie was!” Sure, they got criticisms. But those criticisms had nothing to do with the almost all-male cast.
[Moderating]
Oh, and I still think it shouldn’t have been necessary, but I’ve edited the title.
Because people generally criticize changes; only rarely do they criticize the idea of repeating something that worked in the past. This, of course, can be multiplied by 100 for fan criticism.
…I think we are straying into “this has nothing to do with what I said I don’t know why you quoted me to respond to” territory. The Ghostbusters remake was the movie that the goobers claimed was “made by and for SJW’s.” The actual constructive criticism of the movie got lost in a sea of alt-right activism. Leslie Jones got subjected to the most vile, racist and sexist hatred. Milo got suspended from twitter because of the hate he drove her way.
Nothing like that happened with Star Trek. The Ghostbusters remake is held up as some sort of an exemplar of what happens when you gender-swap a movie. But its performance at the box-office was on a par with similarly funded and reviewed movies. It did about the same. Star Trek was as much as a bomb as the Ghostbuster remake was. But it is never discussed in the same way.
Since no one has jumped in with this hot take yet, let me be the first:
The Bond franchise should be abandoned.
At its core is a character who is . . . ill suited for 21st century sensibilities, and even when the movie tones it down, the franchise still depends on the allure of the Bonds of yore.
Frankly, the best thing “they” can do to keep the franchise relevant is make Bond a woman and abandon the womanizing persona altogether. Still, to me, a 50 year run is more than ample, and I think someone would do well to write a new character free of Bond’s baggage. Maybe that’s what this will be, who knows.
Exactly, Bond was always a middle class white man’s fantasy. There’s really no way to make that relevant to modern times and its core audience is dying off. They can probably do what Mission Impossible did, make movies that have very little to do with the original material and keep the cool music.
You make a great point. It IS strange – almost inexplicable, really – that Star Trek wasn’t criticized for flipping role genders.
I mean, sure, Star Trek didn’t actually do that, but that can’t possibly explain why people didn’t complain about something the movie didn’t do.
What do you think is the reason people didn’t harp on the gender flipping in Star Trek?
…hold on a second: is it your premise that there is something fundamentally wrong with gender flipping? You think the criticism of the Ghostbusters remake for flipping the gender actually had merit?
I get what you’re saying, but I think your logic is flawed. You’re saying that Movie 1 could not have failed due to having Factor A, because Movie 2 did not have Factor A and also failed. That’s like saying that Bob couldn’t have crashed his car because he was drunk, because a week later Jim also crashed his car, and Jim was sober.
That said, I personally don’t think that the new Ghostbusters failed because of the gender of its (excellent) cast; it failed because it just wasn’t funny.
…nope.
I’m saying the people who use the Ghostbusters remake as an exemplar of why casting a black woman as 007 is a mistake have gotten things completely and utterly wrong.
Star Trek: Beyond wasn’t a remake. I know it’s getting a little bit pedantic, but it was a new movie in the JJ Abrams reboot universe.
The latest Ghostbusters movie was effectively a reboot of the franchise with an all-female cast. It wasn’t actually particularly bad, truth be told.
They’re apples and oranges to a large extent- Star Trek Beyond flopped because, like all three of the reboot movies, there’s too much effects and not enough story, and they’re coasting pretty heavily on the whole existing backstory and people coming to watch because it’s a Star Trek movie, not because it’s a good movie.
The last Ghostbusters movie suffered from something different- I think the original movie had a special place in a lot of people’s hearts, and ANY reboot would have suffered by comparison, if it wasn’t just absolutely stellar and reproduced a lot of the magic of the original. Combine that with the fact that gender-swaps like that are not always highly thought of, and you have a built in two strikes against it in a lot of people’s minds. While it wasn’t a bad movie, it wasn’t good enough to overcome the inherent hostility to rebooting such a popular movie, and the added issue of a gender-swap in the bargain.
As for the Bond 25 thing… there’s very little canonical information about what “007” actually means in terms of the Special Intelligence Service. We know it was James Bond’s codename, and that the 00 agents have licenses to kill. But beyond that, we know very little Are there a dozen of them they send around as needed? Are the numbers indicative of certain responsibilities/roles/specializations? I.e. 001 might be a specialist in deep-cover operations, 002 might be a expert poisoner, etc… with 007 being a generalist of some kind. Or 007 might be the agent assigned to supra-national organized crime a-la SPECTRE, while 002 might be the one assigned to keep tabs on S. America. We don’t know.
So having Bond retire and 007 be a woman doesn’t necessarily mean anything. Fundamentally we haven’t been watching 007 movies, we’ve been watching James Bond movies. And there’s even movie proof- “License To Kill” takes place primarily when Bond has gone rogue after being suspended, so it’s not really a 007 movie, but is most certainly a James Bond movie.
Are you being deliberately obtuse? People complained about the gender flipping in Ghostbusters and (dubiously) cited that as a reason it flopped. People didn’t complain about gender-flipping in Star Trek because there wasn’t any. (It also flopped.)
You presented the rhetorical “Why didn’t people complain about Star Trek the same way they complained about Ghostbusters?” My point is that that is a stupid rhetorical question because there wasn’t any gender flipping in Star Trek to make the comparison in the first place.