After months of hype and misguided controversy, the trailer for the first Ghostbusters movie in 32 years (we’ve all agreed to forget 1989’s Ghostbusters II, right?) is here. While most of the discussion around the movie has centered around its all-women cast, the new trailer greets that conversation by, well, vomiting all over it. The new Ghostbusters might have a gender-swapped cast, but that doesn’t mean, it seems to say, it’s above jokes about ghost-barf.
The cast, of course, is the source of the movie’s greatest appeal—and it is surprisingly novel just to see a movie where all the scientists are women—but not because they’re women. The movie reunites Melissa McCarthy and Kristen Wiig for the first time since the runaway success of Bridesmaids, the movie that helped make McCarthy into one of our biggest stars, and they’re joined by two of Saturday Night Live’s funniest castmembers: Kate McKinnon and Leslie Jones. Meanwhile, all the original Ghostbusters, with the exception of the late Harold Ramis, are expected to cameo. Delightfully, new receptionist Chris Hemsworth, aka Thor, doesn’t even get a line.
If you bring sky-high expectations to this trailer, it might not meet them. After all, the highlights of Paul Feig’s comedies tend to be smaller, more performance-based moments, not endlessly quotable lines or show-stopping set pieces. (You can catch a glimpse of this kind of moment when Wiig and McCarthy try to cede to each other who gets to say “Let’s go.”) Here’s hoping this one (out in July) is another Feig-and-McCarthy classic, to go beside Bridesmaids and Spy, rather than a disappointment like The Heat.
