The reviews for Paul Feig’s female-fronted reboot of Ghostbusters are in and … they’re broadly positive, with UK critics cheerleading slightly harder for the film than their peers across the pond.
Not that these – nor even the box office – look likely to affect the chances of the remake spawning a series. At the premiere in Los Angeles on Saturday night, producer Amy Pascal – former CEO of Sony Pictures – told the Hollywood Reporter: “It’s going to be endless. People are going to love this movie so much that’s they’re going to demand more and more.”
Current Sony head Tom Rothman was similarly robust about the film’s prospects, saying the flood of negativity around its production acted as good publicity.
“All that stuff has been great,” he said. “The movie is a comedy, an entertaining comedy, but it is also now a real important part of the social conversation and you don’t usually get to do both of those things.”
The depths of the film’s engagement with the debate it triggered was revealed after stars Kristen Wiig and Melissa McCarthy confirmed a scene in the film was tweaked to directly address the online backlash to the project.
In one scene, the quartet read out pointed and unpleasant comments posted below a YouTube video of them defeating ghouls.
“It was added,” McCarthy told Yahoo Movies. “We did something on the day that slightly tweaked it.”
“I feel like the part was in [the script] already,” added Wiig, “but we changed what was said.”
