is the female film reboot dead?
As Ocean’s 8 opens to tepid reviews, we ask: is the gender-swap trend in film dead?
First, there was the Ghostbusters remake, in which the trio of doofus spook-hunter dudes in the ’80s original were replaced by a gang of funny women. And it famously bombed.
Now Ocean’s 8, featuring Sandra Bullock, Anne Hathaway, Rihanna and a gaggle of Hollywood’s finest female stars instead of George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon et al is in cinemas – and, despite all the excitement around it, the reaction so far from critics is lukewarm to say the least. But there are more female-based reboots of classic male-dominated movies on the
way, from Dirty Rotten
Scoundrels to Lord Of The Flies. Is this trend all about Hollywood becoming more progressive and feminist, or just an indication that everyone’s run out of fresh ideas?
GHOSTBUSTED
In 2016, we all got highly excited by the idea of four brilliantly funny women – Kristen Wiig, Melissa Mccarthy, Leslie Jones and Kate Mckinnon – taking on the male roles from the 1984 original
Ghostbusters. The prospect was great not just because of that dream cast, but also because the movie was co-written and directed by Paul Feig, who did such a great job with his smash-hit female-led comedy Bridesmaids. But although reviews were generally positive if not wildly enthusiastic, the movie only grossed $130million at the US box office, a bit of a disaster when you take into account that it cost nearly $150m to make.
Despite the notoriously nasty right-wing social media backlash against the very idea of women taking the lead roles in a remake of this supernatural comedy classic, experts blamed the failure of the movie more on the general air of indifference surrounding the final film. Word of mouth was that the only special thing about this new
Ghostbusters was that it was a female reboot. In the end, it felt like a political act rather than a must-see movie, with even director Feig later admitting, “For some of our audience, they were like, “What the f**k? We don’t wanna go to a cause. We just wanna watch a f**kin’ movie.”
OCEAN’S NOT GREAT
Now, with the arrival of the female
Ocean’s movie, the same thing seems to be happening. Our own film critic Charles Gant said,
“Ocean’s 8 is a fun watch that never quite rises to its full potential.” It seems like somehow the writer/director Gary Ross (whose varied career ranges from blockbuster phenomenon The
Hunger Games to underwhelming horse biopic Seabiscuit) hasn’t given his great cast enough decent material. Whereas Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s 11 was a dazzlingly stylish and frothy caper in which the modern-day Rat Pack seemed to be having the time of their lives, Sandra Bullock, Cate Blanchett and Sarah Paulson aren’t given much fun stuff to do. In fact, the best comedic role in the whole film is James Corden’s late appearance as an insurance investigator. And there are more laughs in the ten-minute chat Blanchett and Paulson took part in recently on the Today show in the US than in the entire two-hour movie.
DIRTY ROTTEN FEMALES
Both Ghostbusters and Ocean’s 8 are examples of enticing genderflipped reboots whose end product sadly doesn’t match the hype. Maybe the lesson is that it’s not enough to gather a fabulous cast and hope everyone will pay good money to see them. The brilliant Bridesmaids was a huge hit because it gave its actresses relentlessly funny material. Soon, we’ll get to see what Anne Hathaway and Rebel Wilson do in the female version of Dirty Rotten
Scoundrels, called The Hustle, scripted by highly rated female screenwriter Jac Shaeffer (who’s also masterminding Marvel’s
Black Widow film), and directed by hugely talented Brit Chris Addison (The Thick Of It). And then Lord Of The Flies, the classic tale of juveniles stranded on a desert island, is being reimagined with girls instead of boys.
We still have high hopes for these female-fuelled reboots. They just have to be genuinely good…