Ghostbusters 2016 was a disaster. It lost the studio a small fortune, mostly forgot to be funny, and for a movie that was sold big on female empowerment, it must have chaffed that the best performance in it was hands down Chris Hemsworth showing his comedic abilities. Much has been said and written about the movie since it stank out theaters. Quite a lot of it by star Leslie Jones.
The comedienne and Saturday Night Live star has recently completed a memoir – Leslie F—ing Jones: A Memoir – and in excerpts from the novel published in Rolling Stone there was a lot of detail about her participation in Ghostbusters 2016. Among them is that she was offered just $67,000 to star in the movie, while co-star Melissa McCarthy made $14 million.
She says it was made clear to her during the process she was “lucky to even be on that movie” and that she eventually fought to get $150,000 from the $154 million budget.
She was also the target of racist and sexist trolls, which led to her deleting her Twitter account for 24 hours due to so many harmful messages and attempts to hack her account. She said it got so bad that the then-CEO of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, personally got involved. According to Jones, Dorsey:
“…put people on my account to monitor it because someone is always trying to hack me…”
She also went on to say that she couldn’t really believe it was all happening:
“I can’t believe anyone would do this shit to someone, anyone, for working. This is awful. I am in a movie. Death threats for something as small as that?”
She also had plenty to say about the relaunched Ghostbusters franchise from Jason Reitman. He appeared on Bill Burr’s podcast all the way back in 2021 when Ghostbusters: Afterlife was in the pipeline and said that movie was to “hand the movie back to the fans.” Jones took issue with this statement:
“The damage was done. Bringing up the idea of giving the movie ‘back to the fans’ was a pretty clear shout-out to all those losers who went after us for making an all-female film.”
Ghostbusters 2016 will not be getting a sequel. The sequel to Ghostbusters: Afterlife will wrap filming as soon as the strikes finish.
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