Yet for many – chiefly blowhard middle-aged fanboys – their names spelled the apocalypse and the whole project was damned. The memory of their childhood favourite was being destroyed, they argued, by some hare-brained revisionism. A campaign was mounted – successfully – to make the first trailer for the film the most disliked in YouTube history.
Such backlash was notably absent when Planet of the Apes was revamped by Tim Burton, then again by Rupert Wyatt. Likewise when Fede Alvarez dared to reimagine Evil Dead for a new generation. For what incensed Ghostbusters fanatics, it seemed, was Feig’s idea to reverse the genders of the ghostbusting quartet – a decision whose politics his film tackles bluntly and frequently, without sacrificing laughs for sermonising.