When the first trailer for the new Ghostbusters landed on YouTube, it wasn't exactly met with the most positive of responses.
A lot of people pointed to its poor sense of editing, an overt sense of slapstick humour and how it seemed to focus more on the scale of the film rather than any particularly funny moments. Aside from these criticisms, there was a fairly vocal group of 'fans' who felt that Ghostbusters couldn't be played by women - which is just f**king stupid, to be honest.
In any case, the first trailer for the Ghostbusters reboot / sequel / sidequel now has the dubious honour of being one of the most disliked videos in YouTube history. In fact, it's the most disliked official trailer on the entire site.
With a view-count of close to 30,000,000, a total of 546,020 viewers disliked the video as opposed to 206,824 who liked it. Doing the basic maths, that leaves 28,330,010 people who either liked it or didn't feel strongly enough to hit the Dislike button. As well as this, the comments underneath the video were - in the opening days of the the trailer's launch, anyway - loaded with hugely misogynistic, racist and homophobic comments.
What's interesting about these figures is that when compared to other films that didn't fare well with critics - say, for example, the most recent Fantastic Four, or even something like Jem And The Holograms - there isn't anything close to the same number of dislikes.
The official trailer for Fantastic Four has just 709 dislikes with 3.2 million views on YouTube. The same film now has a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 9%. Why the huge disconnect between the two?
There's a pretty simple reason. Trolls.
The Ghostbusters trailer was the subject of an intensive campaign of brigading - which is people turning up and, in some cases creating dummy accounts, just to downvote a video or overload a comments section with a specific agenda. In some cases, it's benevolent.
Uber-fans of Justin Bieber or Jedward will furiously retweet any media outlet that mentions their idols. The other end of the spectrum is people purposefully disliking a trailer for a film they haven't seen because it's got women in it. While we'll fully admit that the trailer wasn't the best for the new Ghostbusters, it certainly doesn't deserve to be lumped with this title.
What do you think? Was it simply a case of people disliking the trailer and voicing their concern or was there something more sinister afoot? Let us know in the comments!
