10 Reasons Why 2016's Blockbusters Are Failing

There have been few pop culture news stories as depressing as the contrived controversy surrounding the Ghostbusters reboot this year.

Generally speaking, the accepted bullsh*t kneejerk response has been that if you don’t like the trailers, the advertisements or - god forbid - the film itself, you’re a woman-hating troll. Equally, if you do, you’re a feminazi out to cut off some genitalia. There’s no middle ground allowed here: it’s black hat versus white knight in a flaming battle to the death.

And it’s bloody boring. The screaming and frothing over the film, and the screaming and frothing over the screaming and frothing, has so totally eclipsed the movie itself that most people can’t even remember whether the new Ghostbusters film is actually supposed to be any good or not.

Gods Of Egypt, which nestled its story (based on Egyptian mythology) inside a rich cast of white men and women, and the previous year’s Exodus: Gods And Kings, which did likewise with its Biblical story based in a similarly African/Middle Eastern setting, both attracted serious condemnation for flaunting their grotesque ‘whitewashing’. Both movies tanked at the box office.

Coincidence? Possible, but unlikely. The key thing is that, as mentioned, people still use the media they surround themselves with - newspapers, magazines, Twitter, you name it - to arrive at a consensus about whether a film is worth watching in the cinema.

If all they hear about it is non-stop polemic about how wrong the film is, so much so that it drowns out whether it’s actually any good, then they’ll simply take a pass on it in favour of something else.