Let me give you a little back story on what this article is really about....
I'm a huge fan of DC Comics. While I love me some Marvel movies, I have always carried a torch for everything from Superman all the way down to Ace the Bat-hound. I was thrilled when they announced that Man of Steel 2 was actually going to be Batman v Superman. I was ready for Ben Affleck as Bruce Wayne/The Batman from day one, but there was a huge backlash online. People were worried they were going to get Daredevil again. No one saw any footage, any screenshots, publicity stills or anything and they all wanted to throw the baby out with the bat(h) water. Nobody, it seemed, wanted to give the new Batman a chance. Even people going so far as to sign petitions asking Warner Bros to recast. But once the teaser trailer appeared online, however, I think people started to see what I felt like I saw the whole time. Now, it looks like they're just trying to shoe horn in a Justice League movie before they actually make a Justice League movie. And I'm fine with that. Then they announced Suicide Squad, which I was admittedly on the fence about. Then I saw this.....
I was seriously at a loss for words. Why does Joker look like Marilyn Manson? WTF is he wearing a grill for? Why does he have tattoos? I realized that I was now on the other side of the fence when it came to Jared Leto when I had been blindly defending "Bat-fleck" months before. I had become the same person I was arguing with at my local comic shop. Then I saw the leaked trailer from Comic-Con and I immediately understood what they were going for with Leto's look and performance. I can now honestly say that I am looking forward to seeing what they do with the character. All of this really got me thinking about how this brother/sisterhood of fandom is truly a double edged, milly mouthed, two-headed monster arguing with itself. Let's journey further down the rabbit hole, shall we?
Ghostbusters 3 has been a hot topic for the last twenty-some odd years. It was happening, it wasn't happening, they're in pre-production, they're in developmental hell. Then the video game happened and everyone thought that was the sequel. Aykroyd said he still had a story to tell. So we all got back on the horse and kept riding it out. Then Harold Ramis (Egon) passed away. Ivan Reitman dropped out as director. People started talking about a reboot. That's when all hell broke loose. Suddenly fans didn't want a new adventure. Bill Murray actually told Aykroyd that "No one wants to see old men catch ghosts." The rumor mill started casting people. But no one expected what would come next......
*GASP!* Women!?! Oh no, not women! How could this travesty come to be?
Meanwhile, I'm just standing in the background thinking to myself 'Melissa McCarthy was hilarious in The Heat'. We are seriously going to be upset that there are going to be female Ghostbusters? In 2015 no less? Gay marriage is legal, our president is African-American, but talented women can't catch CGI ghosts? They brought back the animated series where we got a female 'buster and a handicapable teen. And that was 1997! Are we just going to crap all over a new adventure simply because the Ghostbusters have boobs this time?
Can you imagine before the days of the internet how upset some people may have gotten when Sean Connery stepped down as James Bond? The backlash over Roger Moore? And now, Moore's films are just as iconic. I think that people latch on to characters so much that they cannot imagine someone else being involved in the franchise. And if people are really upset over how drastically a franchise has changed, they can relive the parts they love on Blu-Ray.
At the end of the day, these are characters who have become so ingrained in pop culture that we feel like they belong to us. If someone tries to trample on/change/reboot/recast, the geek culture as a whole feels the need to take sides, draw battle lines and suit up to get behind our computers and angrily type away about why Chris Pratt is domesticating velociraptors. All it does is give us another way to divide ourselves from one another instead of remembering the awesome stuff that brought us together. Sure, we may disagree with character arcs and the like, but let's just be happy that the adventures will continue.
In closing, let's try not to bite the hand that feeds because geek wasn't always so chic. The well might dry up and we may not see stuff like this for a while. Remember that if we hadn't had to sit through Batman and Robin, we might not have gotten Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight Trilogy.
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