It turns out that some people are afraid of ghosts, and those people are moviegoers.
The Ghostbusters reboot, which starred Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, Leslie Jones and Kate McKinnon, will likely fall well short of the $300 million it needs to gross in order to break even, this according to THR.com. To date, the comedy has brought in just over $117 million in the U.S. and another $62 million internationally, with experts predicting it”ll top out at around $225 million worldwide. This means a sequel is likely off the table.
“I just can't fathom the creative talents behind it – Feig, McCarthy, Wiig, etc. – slogging out another one when the reception to the first one was so mediocre,” Jeff Bock, Senior Box Office Analyst at Exhibitor Relations, told the outlet. Sony offered no comment on a sequel, but they disputed the total loss amount saying the “loss calculation is way off.”
Ghostbusters was off to a rough start before it even hit the theaters. Not long after the first trailer was released in March, it soon became the least popular promo in YouTube history. To date it has nearly 1 million “thumbs down.” When the reviews came out, critics were fairly warm to it with a 73 percent favorability rating, but fans were much less kind. Of the more than 100,000 ratings, only 57 percent liked it.
The film opened strong, bringing in $46 million in the U.S., but it was unable to maintain interest, with 50+ percent drops for each of the first three weeks. By Ghostbusters” fourth week in theaters, the movie was down to just $4.6 million.