Well, it’s official. The Ghostbusters movie is a box office flop. It will struggle to earn its production costs. Just as I predicted.
A lot of peripheral issues have been raised about it. The all-female cast. Whether it was funny enough. And so on. None of those are the real problem.
As I said in my earlier post on the subject, the problem is that there’s a limit to how much you can spend making a comedy. Comedies don’t translate and box office blockbusters depend on international audiences for half to two-thirds of their box office.
There’s a devil in that. Appealing to an international audience requires certain, well, compromises that some would characterize as artistic while others would call “political”. They didn’t make those compromises in the production of Ghostbusters.
The movie could easily have been made for $70 million rather than the reported $144 million. That would have made money and laid the groundwork for sequels. As it is, well, it didn’t and lots of people will draw a lot of unwarranted conclusions from that. It’s a shame.
I return to the question I asked before. What the heck was Sony thinking?
