Not wanting an all female team is not inherently sexist.
When you have no good reason against an all-female team, yes, it is sexist.
I mean I can understand if they changed the gender of the original 4, but they didn't, they created new characters, and the team happens to be all female.
Now there are some genuinely sexist (and racist) fans out there who have made their feelings known about this project. But consider that many (if not most) fans wanted a diverse team for the next installment.
And we have a diverse team, and they all happen to be female.
Just not in a way that's the exact opposite of what we had. And definitely not in a complete reboot. Though a complete reboot is probably the only context where that would work.
From what I remember, fans wanted a reboot with a whole younger generation being the Ghostbusters, some even being recasts, which is quite the opposite of the older original team. But instead we have the same age range as the original, but all females instead. Not quite the exact opposite.
And a complete reboot is not happening. They are not reinventing anything.
Still, fans don't agree with those two things. And not together, since it means completely abandoning the old characters. Yes, the characters. It'seems not just actors people would miss.
Look, I love the original team as much as the next fan, but it's simply never going to happen. We were lucky to get a video game reunion. But with one of the main writers and actor Harold Ramis passing, at least half the charm of the original team can't come back. Dan Akroyd has worked countless times to bring the originals together, but it never happened because of Bill Murray.
So yes, the original team needed to be abandoned in a sense. I don't see it as abandonment, it simply just makes the most sense to move the concept to new characters, and there's nothing wrong with that, as posters here have said they would wanted similar characters from younger comedian actors, but the moment all the team was made up of women, it's been nothing but sexism.
And as far as the Johnny casting, it was not 100% racism. Not even close.
Actually, it pretty much was.
The vast majority just hated the idea of changing the appearance of a 50+ year old character from a VISUAL medium; a medium where the visuals are, more or less, the the most important part.
And his visual medium has changed countlessly throughout plenty of eras, even to the point of him being switched to a woman. The only think MBJ was different from Johnny was his race, which for the character is pretty fluid.
When you adapt from a visual medium (particularly comic books), you should at least be able to stick to the most basic elements of its visuals. And in no version has Johnny been black. And worse off, they didn't even write the character in FFINO like Johnny, as we know him.
Other than horrible dialogue here and there, Johnny was pretty much written the same as Chris Evans' Johnny. Evans just managed to have more charm.
So it was a double slap in the face. A double slap the likes of which we got when Sony announced they were not only rebooting Ghostbusters (instead of doing the GB3 film we had long waited for), but discarding the old characters and appealing to an entirely different audience.
Not rebooting or discarding the old characters, just continuing the story of the Ghostbuster business from the point of view of different characters, because the original characters was never gonna happen.
And as much as people love Akroyd, Murray, Ramis and Hudson, we loved those characters even more.
The thing about those characters you loved more is that the original actors gave all the charisma, charm, talent, and chemistry that a recast can never recreate. So you may "love the characters" but recasting them would have been worse than the idea of fans thinking an all-female team is so terrible.
