Trolls, sexist remarks force female Ghostbusters star Leslie Jones to quit Twitter

Los Angeles: In her first major big-screen role, Ghostbusters star Leslie Jones fights supernatural bad guys in New York’s subways, clubs and streets.

But off-screen, even she couldn’t take the abuse being thrown at her by internet trolls.

Jones publicly quit social media this week after receiving a barrage of racist and sexist messages and threats following the film’s release last weekend.

“I leave Twitter tonight with tears and a very sad heart,” she wrote in her last message on the site. “All this because I did a movie.”

For a remake of a 1984 comedy about misfit scientists fighting slimy ghosts in New York, Ghostbusters has proved unusually controversial.

For months, the new film, one among many summer movie releases, has been overshadowed by the fury of film fans enraged by the decision to cast women in its starring roles.

The original film starred Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Harold Ramis and Ernie Hudson as the team of ghost-fighting science nerds set to save their city from a supernatural threat. They were aided by a ditsy female secretary played by Annie Potts.

The new edition flips its predecessor’s casting. In addition to Jones it stars Melissa McCarthy, Kate McKinnon and Kristen Wiig, with Chris Hemsworth as their intellectually challenged assistant.

Since the film was announced, amateur critics on the internet have blasted the decision with an unprecedented barrage of sexist criticism.

“Women are just incapable of being funny” and “feminists ruin the world” were among the assertions of some male social media users. Others infamously said the new cast “ruined” their childhood memories.

Even US presidential candidate Donald Trump asked in an online video rant, “Now they’re making Ghostbusters with only women. What’s going on?”

In the weeks leading to the film’s release, the furore only intensified.

More than 950,000 people “disliked” the official trailer on YouTube, making it the worst-reviewed trailer in YouTube history and indicating an organized campaign against it, according to Hollywood observers.

YouTube film reviewer James Rolfe, whose film review channel has 2 million subscribers, said he would not even watch the film because “if you already know you’re going to hate it, why give them your money?”

Since the film opened in the US, Middle East and Latin America last weekend, professional reviews have been largely positive.

But an analysis by Salon.com showed a gender gap: 84 percent of female reviewers in the US liked the film, while 77 percent of male reviewers did not.

Explaining the disparity, Salon cited Hollywood’s most successful female actress, Meryl Streep, who said in a 2015 discussion that Hollywood’s historic focus on male characters leaves men unaccustomed to empathizing with women.

“It’s a very hard thing for them to put themselves in the shoes of female protagonists,” she said.

The film’s director, Paul Feig, said while some of the criticism is over too many remakes of classic films, much is “straight-up misogyny.”

McCarthy pointed out in an interview with the New York Times that “normal, healthy people don’t stand outside saying, ‘you’re ruining my childhood.’”

But the film and its cast may get the last laugh. Screenwriter Katie Dippold, who co-wrote the script with Feig, in some cases turned the sexist attacks into jokes.

In one scene, Wiig’s character posts videos of the ghostbusters’ exploits on YouTube. A commenter writes in response, “ain’t no bitches gonna bust no ghosts.”

But as the film goes on to show, they do. And in the real world, Ghostbusters earned 46 million dollars with opening weekend audiences in the US - nearly half of them men, according to the Los Angeles Times.