As we continue our celebration of “Ghostbusters” this week, the film, which opens this Friday, July 15, faces yet another foe: phony IMDb ratings.
In a move that comes as totally unsurprising, the same obnoxious bros who have flooded the “Ghostbusters” trailer with downvotes have taken their crappy cause to IMDb and are giving the all-female reboot low 1/10 ratings.
As Screen Crush reports, “If you head over to the IMDb page for Feig’s ‘Ghostbusters’ reboot, you’ll notice that the film has a user rating of 3.6 out of 10, which isn’t the lowest rating on the site…But what makes the ‘Ghostbusters’ rating particularly notable is that the film doesn’t even hit theaters until this weekend, and most of the early promo screenings for the general public aren’t taking place until sometime this week. Which means most of these people are rating the new ‘Ghostbusters’ without seeing it first.”
If only we could curtail the Internet access of sad, misogynist man boys — comment sections would never be the same.
As Screen Crush goes on the detail, the 1 votes are inherently suspect. Not only have the majority of these users not seen the film, but the gender breakdown of the votes is exactly as you’d expect. “The ratings come from 1,865 men and 169 women — a huge disparity in voters, with the average for the former sitting at 3.6 and the latter at 5.4. Of the total number of male users, 758 between the ages of 18 and 29 gave an average rating of 4, while 834 between the ages of 30 and 44 gave an average rating of 3.1.”
Adding to the suspicious nature of these votes is the fact that the film has a score of 77 on Rotten Tomatoes. So critics and writers who have seen the film are scoring it much higher than these fabricated IMDb scores.
And speaking of critics, as it turns out, female critics are having a much more positive response to the film than male ones. As The Hollywood Reporter writes, “Track down a review from a leading female critic and you’re likely to find that the new movie…gets a solid thumbs-up. But check in with some of the top male critics and you’re just as likely to run into a negative critique.”
The numbers go into more detail: “Of the total group of reviewers, the 43 men gave the movie a 72 percent positive and 28 percent negative (or ‘rotten’) rating. But among the 18 women, the movie got a warmer reception — 89 percent positive and only 11 percent negative. Among those reviewers that Rotten Tomatoes separates out as ‘top critics,’ the differences in opinion were even more pronounced. The 17 top critics included 11 men and 6 women. The male critics…were mostly unimpressed — 64 percent of their reviews were negative, while just 36 percent were positive. Among the six women critics, the results were almost entirely reversed — 67 percent were positive and 33 percent were negative.”
As we’ve reported before, the number of critics, and top critics at that, on Rotten Tomatoes are skewed in favor of men. And as Dr. Martha Lauzen’s report, “Thumbs Down 2016: Top Film Critics and Gender,” pointed out, not only are there more male film critics in total, but the greatest discrepancy between male and female writers occurred for science fiction features. Men penned 84 percent and women 16 percent of reviews in the genre.
As Lauzen told THR, “I’m inclined to treat ‘Ghostbusters’ as a special case in that the response to the idea of the film, in advance of its release, has been unusually polarized and relatively high profile. While these largely negative comments have not been made by professional critics, certainly reviewers writing for the largest media outlets would be aware of this reaction,” she said.
So the battle of the sexes over “Ghostbusters” continues, and as the female film critics and audience members finally rejoice in the release of the film, the only worthwhile thing to say to the haters comes from Manohla Dargis: “Girls rule, women are funny, get over it.”
