Movies as Ideology (Part I)

In its domestic opening weekend Suicide Squad, the latest adventure in the DCEU, earned 135.1 million dollars. As of this writing the reboot Ghostbusters has earned an estimated 116.7 million domestic in 3.5 weeks of release. The two films Rotten Tomatoes critics scores are 73% for Ghostbusters and 26% for Suicide Squad respectively. In the realm of public opinion (as measured by IMDB user ratings) this trend is reversed.  Suicide Squad pulls in an weighted average score of 7.0 (median is 8.0) and Ghostbusters lags behind with a weighted average of 5.5 (median is 7.0). Why is there this difference in opinion?

Its Sexism Stupid.



Now obviously, not every person who liked Suicide Squad and hated Ghostbusters is a sexist, but as a group sexism made a major difference. In the run up to the Ghostbusters release the film was hit with a barrage of online sexism. This sexism was carried over to the general public. According to data recorded by IMDB women, voters gave the film a weighted average score of 7.8 (median 9.0). Men on the other hand gave the film a weighted average of only 4.9 (median 5.0). These results are statistically significant.

Statistical Note: P value =0.04 (95% CI), Female N=12342, Male N=34421, cohen's d=1.6

In addition you can see that more men, (34.5) then women (4.9) gave the film a 1 star score.

                                   (Men)                                                     (Women)

Statistical Note: The result was not statistically significant at 95% CI Level (P=0.16) however type II error might have been the culprit given the above result on the full sample. Power was 87.7 compared to 94.6 in the full sample. Cohen's d=1.08, Female N=603,  Male N=11887.

In contrast, despite hard to argue cases of misogyny and racism male and female IMDB voters felt the same way about Suicide Squad.

 

Now keeping in mind that this is a convenience sample, not meant to representative, it certainly brings up some interesting questions because it seems according to the analysis above, overt feminism is punished by the public whereas sexism is not.    

(Come back next time when I talk about the idea of cultural hegemony, capitalism and the works of Antonio Gramsci!)