Why the internet's whiny male trolls can't wait to see the new 'Ghostbusters' fail

Kristen Wiig as Professor Erin Gilbert in the upcoming Ghostbusters, out in July.

To be perfectly transparent, I am not looking forward to the new Ghostbusters.

This is in part because I love the original film(s), but primarily because it would've been much cooler if a new spin on the "paranormal investigation" genre had been dreamed up for an all-female cast. Instead of something fresh and exciting, we continue to watch on as cultural ephemera from three decades ago squats on the imagination of the present.

So, when new character posters for Ghostbusters were released this week, my heart sank, specifically when I saw Kate McKinnon's character, Holtzmann, accompanied by the quote "Booyah! Emphasis on the boo".

Theoretical physics is Holtzmann's job, wordplay is her passion. #Ghostbusters pic.twitter.com/pkJIihyNUg

— Ghostbusters (@Ghostbusters) April 18, 2016

"Wordplay is her passion"? How could it not be, when she's spouting witty lines like "Booyah! Emphasis on the boo". I mean, in the pantheon of classic lines, it's no "Ray… Pretend for a moment that I don't know anything about metallurgy, engineering, or physics - and just tell me what the hell is going on." Heck, it's not even "Try the brie, it's at room temperature!"

What I didn't do, however, was charge over to YouTube to express my displeasure by honking the "thumbs down" button on the Ghostbusters trailer, which was this week given the questionable honour of having been crowned YouTube's "most disliked" trailer. In history.

Just let that sink in for a moment. The Ghostbusters trailer is cheesy, weirdly oversaturated, and features some instantly forgettable one-liners, but it's certainly no worse than literally any other blockbuster comedy trailer currently doing the rounds (in fact, it's probably better than most).

Indeed, there have been, plainly, far worse trailers than the new Ghostbusters' one. Even in recent memory, we've got Adam Sandler's regrettable The Ridiculous 6, the lumpen Fantastic Four preview, and the craptastic and heavily Jesse Eisenberg-featuring Batman v Superman: Dawn Of Justice.

Surprise, surprise, a decent portion - 59 per cent - of YouTube's "most disliked" videos prominently feature women. "In addition to the Ghostbusters trailer, there's Miley Cyrus, Katy Perry, Taylor Swift, Nicki Minaj, Madonna, and even Adele. Who hates Adele?!," Screencrush reported. (Rebecca Black's perennial clanger 'Friday' takes out the top spot.) Many of the other disliked videos, like Justin Bieber's back catalogue, are music typically viewed as being marketed to young women or girls.

Make no mistake: the amount of dislikes the Ghostbusters' trailer is receiving is in no way organic. This is witless misogyny run rampant. There are fanboys crowing proudly about having created bots that are driving up dislikes automatically. The comments feature pronouncements like "Lets [sic] get it to a million!" In this instance, "it" refers to the dislikes count.

It remains to be seen whether the online hate campaign that has followed Ghostbusters since its inception as a mere concept will affect its box office return. As Charles Bramesco notes in his Vanity Fair coverage, "The real-life ramifications of the online backlash have yet to be seen. For one, the current count of 590,501 dislikes pales in comparison to the grand total of 29,553,420 views on the video, suggesting that the box-office returns won't suffer too badly."

The new Ghostbusters may well turn out to be a stinker that will eventually be relegated to the cinematic scrap pile along with storied classics like Wild Wild West and The Avengers (the other one). Alas, as it's been pushed from the word go as "the all-female Ghostbusters reboot", all signs also point to any aspect of failure the film experiences being chalked up to it being "a women's film".

Ever thus: in Hollywood, it's commonplace for films directed by or prominently starring women that don't do well to be held up as evidence against taking a chance on any future "female" properties.

As Linda Holmes so sagely wrote during the great female character drought of 2013, "You can apparently make an endless collection of high-priced action flops and everybody says 'win some, lose some' and nobody decides that They Are Poison, but it feels like every 'surprise success' about women is an anomaly and every failure is an abject lesson about how we really ought to just leave it all to The Rock."

In other words, if Ghostbusters fails, it won't be "because audiences are sick of the endless reheating of properties that were already done perfectly years ago", but rather "BECAUSE THEY PUT GIRLS IN IT!"

Despite what I've said about wanting more women to direct and write films I loathe, I'm always willing to be surprised. I'd love to go see 2016 Ghostbusters and spend the next two decades of my life quoting it with the slightly psychotic dedication that I have spent the previous two rattling off the "Gozer the Traveller" speech at parties.

And, more than anything, I'd love to find every single entitled, whiny male fan who's hit the dislike button or crowed about how 2016 Ghostbusters is going to tank, round them up, and see them roasted in the depths of the Sloar.