For our annual summer countdown, we are looking at our favorite 25 movies that were not huge hits during their initial release, but mean a lot to us. Check out last year’s Summer of Stars countdown or the year before when we did blockbusters! Find the rest of the Flop and Fizzle series here!

by Katharine Mussellam, Contributor

I didn’t find out that the 2016 version of Ghostbusters was considered a box office flop until several years after I had seen it. Despite the initial detractors online, everything about its arrival was positive in my mind. The newspaper my family subscribes to heralded the film with a glowing review titled “Haters Gonna Hate.” When I went to the theatre to see it, lots of people were there, and I wasn’t the only one laughing. My Tumblr dashboard was flooded with Ghostbusters posts that summer.

Many people who don’t deserve more than a passing thought were so certain the film wasn’t made for them, even before they’d seen as much as a trailer. But when I saw that film, it seemed like it was made for my friends and me. Our different choices of universities and programs had scattered us around the country, but we remained in touch. I couldn’t help but think of us as I watched the film.

We were all women taking on academic pursuits, so the kinship with the characters was pretty much instantaneous, at least for me. Having presented an essay at my school’s undergraduate conference and keen to do so again, I thought at the time that I wanted to be a professor (an English professor, though, not science). Because of that, Erin Gilbert (Kristen Wiig) was a character I immediately latched onto. Watching her get excited about getting to give her lectures in the university’s big hall, I saw my own possible future and the excitement that would come with its successes. On the other hand, my friends who were studying science enjoyed seeing portrayals of women scientists, especially the portrayal of a woman who was a physicist. 

On a sillier note, the scene at the metal concert made me instantly think of them: a few of us were rock music aficionados, and I knew the humor of that scene would resonate. And of course, the entire film is about the friendship between these four women who bond over a common interest to become a strong team. My friends are very important to me, and I loved seeing the friendship between the women in the film take center stage. We were academic women who also liked to be silly and have fun, and who have some interests that perhaps not everyone would understand. I loved seeing that kind of friendship portrayed on film in the entertaining world of Ghostbusters, where the weirdos are the likeable heroes. For those reasons, I thought this new film might have even surpassed the original. I liked this film pretty much right away, whereas my initial response to the original Ghostbusters wasn’t as unequivocally enthusiastic, even though I knew it was a classic. I enjoyed this 2016 group’s antics, and I found their journey a bit more realistic since they had to work for their success more than their predecessors.

Ghostbusters had a pretty big presence in my consciousness the summer it came out, and it’s the memories of my friends that make what I remember about that summer and the film particularly special to me. When four of us met for lunch and laser tag to catch up, we talked about the scenes in the film we liked and who our favorite characters were. When we were planning what codenames to pick for laser tag, it was clear almost right away  – we would use the Ghostbusters’ names. Fortunately, we didn’t have to fight over who got what name, and I naturally chose my favorite character’s name, Gilbert. I couldn’t help but notice the way the apparatus for laser tag resembled proton packs in the way they slung over our shoulders and the way you held the device to shoot. I really felt like we were the Ghostbusters. And maybe that summer we were.