“How Ocean’s 8 Succeeded Where Ghostbusters Went Wrong”

I’m surprised that this is a hot-ish take (which I guess makes it a lukewarm-ish take, right?), but: Ocean’s 8 is a superior gender-flipped reboot to most other gender-flipped reboots released to date, chief among them being Ghostbusters ’16, a movie I do not have a positive relationship with. 

Look, the plain damn truth is that these gender-flipped reboots don’t work as movies as well as they work as easy studio pitches; if you really want to serve the cause of including women in franchising ventures, try being bold and slapping together something from parts unrelated to a pre-existing series maybe. Sounds crazy! I know it does. But trust me when I say that’s a way better route to take than apathetically gender bending past dude-led movies. 

I could go on but then I’d be giving away the sweet piece I wrote for The Week, which you can read if you do what you always do on the Internet and click on the hyperlink.

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