8 Signs Ghostbusters Won't Be As Bad As You Think

7. Paul Feig's Best Jokes Are Often Not Funny In Trailers

The trailer tries and tries to be funny, throwing out jokes built on top of jokes within jokes, yet there's not a single funny moment. That's pretty damning for a movie that would best be described as a comedy, but while it definitely shows the trailer editors have an odd sense of humour, it doesn't necessarily mean the movie is completely lacking a funny bone. I've talked in the past about how Pixar typically release trailers full of jokes that don't work in the short teasers, yet are absolutely hysterical in the finished film (see Inside Out's dinner conversation), and the same is true for Paul Feig's previous works. Just look at the trailers for Spy, which managed to take the borderline genius self-aggrandising monologue from Jason Statham (he's far and away the best thing in that otherwise pretty standard spy spoof) and reduced it to a flappy attempt to condense a movie-long gag into the space of twenty seconds. Could this be the case for Ghostbusters? Have solid gags been edited to the point of being tiresome? Quite possibly - many of the jokes come entirely out of context, and some of them (Holtzmann's wig and hat confusion) just have to have more to them than that. Right?
Contributor
Contributor

Film Editor (2014-2016). Loves The Usual Suspects. Hates Transformers 2. Everything else lies somewhere in the middle. Once met the Chuckle Brothers.