Femme!busters bombed busters, I guess. Although Sony's all "no, dude. no, dude, we merched the fuck outta that shit so it's not that bad." Well, not as hard as Big Fucking Giant or
Fucking Why Would You Remake This Ben Hur.
But, perhaps a silver lining in the current talk about animated projects. Always interested in animation, of course. Whether or not it'll be any
good is another beast entirely, but I'm still interested. Now, someone insisted that Femme!busters actually did worse than Tarzan, the latter being a more definite domestic bomb. So I looked up the numbers on IMDB:
Femme!busters
Budget: $144,000,000 (estimated)
Opening Weekend: $46,018,755 (USA) (15 July 2016)
Gross: $123,933,072 (USA) (19 August 2016)
Tarzan
Budget: $180,000,000 (estimated)
Opening Weekend: $38,135,000 (USA) (1 July 2016)
Gross: $125,440,608 (USA) (19 August 2016)
Ghostboobsters was a bigger opener than Tarzan but not by much and then still fell short on it on total domestic take to date, although neither domestic take is that hot given those over-inflated budgets. Shit, you could make 5 Deadpools outta their combined budgets! Why the fuck are the budgets so goddamn high? Does the catering bill include caviar and foie gras? FFS. Neither one made back their budget in domestic. Both bombs! Worth noting tho':
Ghostbusters:
$193,786,077 (Worldwide) (15 August 2016)
Tarzan:
$312,750,024 (Worldwide) (4 August 2016)
This makes Tarzan actually look impressive, but we don't know how much of that tally is considered an actual profit given that international bo takes a higher cut. Never mind marketing costs for either picture. Sony squawks about merchandising so, yeah, merch is probably the only thing that kept their heads up on this one. Funny how Tarzan is being made as a huge bomb and Ghostbusters' failure is almost being kept under the rug. I know if I went and told 'casuals' that it bombed, they'd react with disbelief.
--Cunty rant below--
The sad thing Ghostbusters will result in another "dem womens can't carry a pict-ture" moment when the casting was uninspired to begin with. Is there any crossover appeal between fans of Ghostbusters and the audience who likes Melissa McCarthy enough to give her hits like The Heat? I liked The Heat and I still didn't want her in Ghostbusters. Even so, the picture was so risk adverse. It should've killed Melissa off and made her into a ghost. And then the picture was from the writer of The Heat AND the director of The Heat and written by both of them?
You know what, by themselves, none of those are bad. Nothing wrong with the writer of The Heat writing Ghostbusters or the director of The Heat directing Ghostbusters.
But... if you put sugar, flour, and butter together, you're gonna get a cookie. Even if you do it out of order, you're still gonna get a fucking cookie. Don't put the same ingredients together and expect to get something different. Don't paint it with green frosting and call it Ghostbusters. No one wanted "The Heat but with ghosts."
And then this whole fucking film just felt so rude to minorities in the whole "Let's just cast one. Let's put her on the side of the poster while the three white chicks gets the middle. Let's not make her a scientist because black people don't science." What were they thinking? When minorities are buying a huge number of the movie tickets? People can argue that wasn't what it was but that's what it was because it happens over and over and over again. No Latinas, no Native Americans, no Asians? Not one of those? And we can say "Nuri, stop talking about race bloob bloob bloob" but how much fucking fun could we have had with that? Just in my culture alone there's so many stories and kooky superstitions and at least one
curandera. There's more than enough supernatural stuff to make a fresh narrative that would've put butts in seats. Goddammit, I almost want to write my own fuckin' Ghostbusters... but I won't 'cause omg fuckin' ghosts.
/end blog