ANY COMMENT BY SOMEONE WHO HAS CLEARLY NOT SEEN THE FILM WILL BE REMOVED. SEE MOD NOTE IN COMMENTS.

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Summary: Erin Gilbert and Abby Yates are a pair of unheralded authors who write a book positing that ghosts are real. A few years later, Gilbert lands a prestigious teaching position at Columbia University, but her book resurfaces and she is laughed out of academia. When ghosts invade Manhattan, Gilbert reunites with Yates, teaming up with a nuclear engineer, Jillian Holtzmann, and a subway worker, Patty Tolan, to save the world from a mysterious evil and powerful demon known as Rowan who can exercise control over human forms.

Director: Paul Feig

Writers: Katie Dippold, Paul Feig

Cast:

• Melissa McCarthy as Abby Yates

• Kristen Wiig as Erin Gilbert

• Kate McKinnon as Jillian Holtzmann

• Leslie Jones as Patty Tolan

• Chris Hemsworth as Kevin Beckman

• Andy García as the Mayor Bradley

• Charles Dance as Harold Filmore

• Michael Kenneth Williams as Hawkins

• Cecily Strong as Jennifer Lynch

• Neil Casey as Rowan

• Elizabeth Perkins as a scientist

• Michael McDonald as Jonathan The Theater Manager

• Matt Walsh as Rourke

• Nate Corddry as Leif

• Pat Kiernan as a news anchor

Cameos:

• Bill Murray

• Dan Aykroyd

• Sigourney Weaver

• Ernie Hudson

• Annie Potts

• Ozzy Osbourne

Rotten Tomatoes:

Metacritic:

After Credits Scene?: Yes

With everyone posting literally every review of the movie on this subreddit, I thought a megathread would be a better idea. Mods feel free to take this down if this is not what you want posted here. Due to a few requests, I have placed other notable reviews in a secondary table below the "Top Critics" table.

New reviews will be added to the top of the table when available.

Top Critics

Other Notable Critics

So recently Melissa McCarthy gave an interview where she stated she wasn't sure where all the hate for this movie came from. You can find the article

As we approach the latest Ghostbusters movie, which skips 2016 entirely, I'm curious to know what people liked/disliked about the movie.

For me, I was pretty interested to see where they would go with a female team taking over. I was pretty certain it would work and be interesting.

That was until I saw the trailer, which told me this was going to be awful and just completely missed the point of Ghostbusters. What I didn't like was:

Compared to the OG Ghostbusters, all four women were just generic comic relief. The OG movies had a balance of trying to be scientific, funny and action packed. The newer version was just making an attempt to be comedic about everything. Instead of four strong female characters, we just got 4 complete jokes.

The receptionist problem. In the OG movies, Janine is a sassy and competent receptionist, who is pretty engaging and relatable. The reboot decided to make the receptionist a bumbling male idiot, whilst trying far too hard to paint the all female team as the intelligent party. Total waste of Chris Hemsworth in this role.

The jokes, or lack of: OG Ghostbusters has just the right amount of humour in their movies. The line about the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man just needing to get laid always cracks me up. But the jokes land in those movies because they're written into the story, the story isn't written around the jokes. The reboot is way too loud and tries so hard to be funny. Screaming generic black character and screaming generic nervous character, aren't funny. Also getting kicked in the balls jokes have been done to death.

The human villain might've been fun but his plan made no sense and he wasn't written well.

But that's my two cents. Did you like the movie? Why? Why not?

As one of the few people who haven't seen the original I want to see what the new film will be like without automatically hating it.

UPDATE 1: Not going to be able to see Ghostbusters(2016) until Sunday but hopefully I will be able to watch both then and have another update on Monday.

UPDATE 2: Got slightly carried away and wrote a quite long review for Ghostbusters(2016), I'll watch the original tonight and post my thoughts tomorrow

UPDATE 3: I starting writing a brief review be got carried away... Ghostbusters 2016 review Contains spoilers for the whole movie, obviously.

Is it the worst films I've ever seen? No, but it's incredibly close. For a film that used the line "women can be funny" in their advertising the main cast was easily the worst part of the film. Aside from a couple of Holtzman(Kate McKinnon) scenes I didn't laugh at any of their jokes and was honestly left quite creeped out and uncomfortable by Gilbert's(Kristen Wiig) interactions with Kevin(Chris Hemsworth). For a film that wanted to promote equality Hemsworth's character was basically used as eye candy. Despite that Hemsworth was without doubt the best part of the film. Despite not actually knowing who the cameos were they seemed like pretty good nods to the original when I had them pointed out to me.
The antagonist was pretty underwhelming, the whole "no one likes me so I'm going to kill everyone" motive never really appealed to me in any film and all we get it a very undeveloped version of that. The fact the final ghost battle was solved with a cock shot was nothing more than a cheap gag.
Party Tolan(Leslie Jones) just seemed like a walking stereotype of "big loud black woman" although she was definitely more interesting than the other ghostbusters, aside from Holtzman. Abbie Yates(Melissa McCarthy) is hardly worth mentioning, aside from her possession scene she didn't really do anything overly interesting. The CGI was used to much in my opinion and the ghosts were far too neon blue and green. Whatever that song was they used for the film was awful although the standard music they used throughout wasn't bad.
The science in the film made little to no sense, I have no idea if all the scientific terms being thrown out at all times are remotely accurate but their proton packs seemed to from trapping ghost to murdering them in the final part of the film.
They also made several jabs in the film at the fact everyone disliked this films from the moment it was announced and got a lot of hate, which to me just came across as immature bullshit. Overall I'll give it a 4.5/10, it had some good moments but also the majority of the jokes didn't land.
Now on to the original.

I don't know why but I find it a lot harder to explain my feelings of the old ghostbusters than the new one. Without doubt it was the better film and I think one of the reasons for that is that it didn't seem to try as hard to be funny. Gb(2016) was bad joke after bad joke whilst the original was just...funny. It didn't rely on one liners and cheap jokes to be funny, the characters themselves just were naturally funny. I'd give it a 8/10. Actually it turns out quite a lot of the original was improv which explains that.

Overall I have to say that despite not having any bias due to nostalgia, the original film is by far the better of the two. Thanks for reading!

The cast was never the problem with the 2016 movie. They could have made this work, they just needed to do a few things differently and it would have been a stronger movie.

First, make it a direct sequel. Have the four women be the proteges or children of the original four. Some are totally into Ghostbusting, some want nothing to do with it. However, they are forced to come together when the three remaining Ghostbusters are taken out of the picture. Now they are the only ones who can keep the city safe.

In addition, the four characters needed to be more similar to the original characters.

• Kristen Wiig is the Peter Venkman character. She's shady as hell, cuts corners, and is only in it for the fame.

• Leslie Jones is the Ray Stantz character. She knows everything about ghosts, the conspiracies, and rattles them off every chance she gets. She's incredibly paranoid but in the end always proven correct.

• Kate McKinnon remains largely the same. She's the crazy Egon type character who's always inventing. She's in it for the science and isn't that interested in whether it helps people.

• Melissa McCarthy is the Winston Zeddmore type character. She's very street smart, and she's a demolitions expert from her days in the military. (Like how Winston was originally going to be written.) She's the heart of the outfit because she cares the most for the people in the city.

• Also, keep Chris Hemsworth as the secretary and make him a popular and sassy social media star/influencer. Because imagining that makes me laugh.

Now that we have more clearly defined characters with their own motivations, they are taking on more and more ghosts because something big is coming. They fight about what they should be doing with the Ghostbusters legacy until they have to band together and use their unique skills to truly become a team. At the end there's a "cross the streams" moment where they are all willing to make the ultimate sacrifice to save everyone, but of course they make it.

Also, the theme song needs to be much better than whatever the hell Fallout Boy did. Make it a cover that more closely resembles the original, and use a female singer who's more of a rocker.

There you go. It won't be as good as the original (not even the sequel could do that) but it would be a much better movie.

I saw the trailer and while I didn't get super excited, I also didn't see the reason to downvote it into oblivion like the rest of YouTube did. I do agree that Ghostbusters did NOT need a remake or reboot so they might as well have just left it alone because the original is such a classic. But I generally like Paul Feig's movies and I like Melissa McCarthy and Kate McKinnon. Kristen Wiig gets on my nerves though. It's something I'd probably go see if there wasn't anything else more appealing that weekend...or just wait until it comes out for rent.

Imagine the original Bill Murray team turning their firehouse into a ghost busting school to help train a new generation of Busters. This way you can have the female team that happened and still have Team Murray.

You can even have both teams separated by big bad ghost while the new team hold the fort down. Team Murray returns after realizing they were led on a wild goose chase away from the city.

Team McKinnon will have her squad lead the charge against a ghost invasion but ends up losing. Team Murray comes back Avengers Endgame portal scene style and unite with Team McKinnon.

Both teama fight off the ghost army and win the day

This whole sub is trash, the majority of posts are widely-held opinions, people are so delusional. So I decided to post an actually unpopular opinion for once: the 2016 ghostbusters remake is more entertaining than the original. I recently watched the original for the first time since i was a kid, and it was NOT FUNNY. I don’t think I laughed out loud once. Ernie Hudson’s character is so dull, it’s mind boggling, he adds absolutely nothing to the film. Dan Akroyd was never funny in anything, ever. Bill Murray and Sigourney Weaver are the only good parts of the movie, but in this movie they aren’t funny so much as endearing. On the other hand, Kate McKinnon, Melissa McCarthy and Chris Hemsworth cracked me up, and the 2016 movie as a whole was just more fun

I hated Ghostbusters. As a die hard Ghostbusters fan, it's fair to say that I am a little biased, even more so when you factor that I have been against this whole thing from the very beginning. I wouldn't say I softened on it as time went by, but I certainly became more open to the possibility of the movie not being horrible. The expectations I went in with were still low, but I didn't want to hate this movie. I didn't want it to be bad. I wanted Ghostbusters back in my life.

It starts off bad right from the very beginning. I get that it's a remake, but do they need to crib the exact pattern of the first movie? Sky shot of a building with ominous music, a prologue that sets up our first sighting of the paranormal, 10 seconds of the Ghostbusters theme music, then we are at the school where one of the soon-to-be-Ghostbusters work. Then again, why mess with what works, right? Except, this first scene sets the tone for the type of movie we are in for, and it only takes two minutes to know we are in trouble. Whereas the original movie had the humor come from the characters in relation to what is going on around them, the new Ghostbusters is forcing the laughs out from everything but the story.

Take for example the scene at the beginning of the original movie where Peter, Ray and Egon are going to the library to investigate the supposed ghost sighting. The questions Peter as the librarian, the banter between the three scientists, when they go to the basement and discuss the goo, the stacked books, and then finally see the ghost. When Peter smacks the calculator out of Egon's hand... I laugh every time at that. Of course the classic "get her" and running out of the library. Even the way each of them run out. Ray with with shocked face, arms in the air. Peter just kinda shuffling along not quite believing what he saw. These are all earned laughs mined from the story that is unfolding around them.

Early in the new movie, there is a scene where Kristen Wiig goes to visit McCarthy in her lab. McCarthy confuses her for her Chinese food delivery man at first, who is also standing at the door. What then unfolds is a 2 minute bit about how the Chinese food place never gives her enough wontons in her soup. She complains about all the broth, holds the container up showing the one wonton, says it's not even a whole wonton and it's cut in half, and inside that half she doesn't even see any meat, only a carrot. There is back and forth with her and the delivery man, until she gets on the phone to complain to the restaurant that they screwed up her soup order again. This is just one example of the kind of humor the movie is going for. It's filled with this. The movie does manage a few laughs the few times it doesn't try to force anything, and it mostly comes from Kate McKinnon, who is the best part of a really terrible movie. The movie is at it's best when it just lets things unfold naturally, which happens far too infrequently.

Every cameo feels forced, and is worse than the one before it. Every male character is dumb as a box of rocks, and the climactic battle is resolved by firing all of their protons backs at the (male) villains groin. There are 1 or 2 non-sequiturs which garner WTFs instead of laughs, the CGI is terrible, and the whole conflict wraps up with a portal not only sucking in all the ghosts, but magically repairing all of the buildings and damage so that no evidence of anything happening even exists. The soundtrack is terrible, there is ZERO NYC vibe, and the movie ends with the Ghostbusters in Hook & Ladder 8, overlooking a night time view of the city with buildings lighting up their windows with I LOVE GB. The problem with this is that all of the final battle is in virtually empty streets where any bystanders who were around have been frozen in a dance position (yup) by the villain. A villain who literally turns himself in a cartoon of the Ghostbusters logo as his final form. A villain who's motivations make no sense.

The movie doesn't even try to elicit any scares out of the audience. The whole thing is played for laughs and there is zero respect for what is going on. It's very nearly a spoof with Scary Movie levels of humor. You like farts? There's farts. You like puns? There's puns. What there isn't, is actual natural humor. This is a turd of a movie, and one of the worst remakes I've ever seen. I hate it. I want to forget it exists and I never want to see another Ghostbusters movie again. It's completely ruined.

EDIT: I want to add that I'm not against this type of comedy. It's this style that drives many of the successful Feig and Apatow-style movies of the past decade. But it doesn't work in a high concept movie like this, particularly when you are attempting to remake a movie that was the total opposite in tone. You can't just apply a Paul Feig approach to any movie and have it work. A great filmmaker adapts his or her style for each new movie, not copy and pastes.

The failure of this movie, and the reason there has been such hate/dislike for it from the very beginning has nothing to do with whether the characters are male or female. It is because fans wanted it to retain the history and the tone of the original movies, and from the earliest signs, it was evident that that was not going to be the case.