The Ghostbusters trailer is currently the most “disliked” movie preview on YouTube; some 800,000 fans have clicked the thumbs-down button, indicating an organized campaign against the film (for comparison, the Captain America: Civil War trailer has only 12,000 dislikes). Its comments thread is filled with fans defending their down-votes as being “on merit alone,” as if a major Hollywood studio film has never had shaky advertising before. Rolfe’s justification for skipping the movie focuses mostly on the arrogance of remaking a classic. “This isn’t just any franchise, this is Ghostbusters,” he intones, invoking the memory of the original film’s deceased star Harold Ramis.

Here are just some of the major franchises Hollywood has rebooted in the last decade: Batman. Superman. Spider-Man. James Bond. Star Wars. Planet of the Apes. Halloween. Friday the 13th. The Evil Dead. The Thing. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Robocop. Every Disney animated classic, starting with Cinderella and continuing with The Jungle Book this year. The list could go on endlessly, even without counting TV spinoffs. All have some provoked fan consternation, but final judgment is usually withheld until after the movie hits theaters. Ghostbusters, by contrast, has become a rallying cause for a swathe of fans who are beginning to resemble a movement not unlike the Gamergate nightmare that continues to plague the world of video games.

The vitriol directed at Ghostbusters seems to come in two forms: angry screeds in comments sections and people’s Twitter mentions, and videos like Rolfe’s, which try to justify the pushback as an idealistic defense of the original franchise’s legacy. Others look to dismiss the female cast as some sort of reverse-sexism, a “marketing gimmick” that diminishes the stars by turning them into tokens. “What offends me about this film isn’t that there’s women in it. Or even that the women are the protagonists. It’s that it’s going backwards 30 years in time and calling itself progressive,” one Cinemassacre commenter wrote. “I think the biggest reason this film will suck is they tried to shoehorn in a PC ideology instead of just telling a good story,” said another. Even the presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump joined the pile-on last year, the substance of his criticism amounting to “What’s going on!?”

Embedded in all of these preemptive and logically flimsy complaints is an obvious subtext: that the issue of appearance matters more than actual quality, and that the idea of a female cast taking up the mantle of a very male film series is just somehow wrong. The 1984 Ghostbusters is indeed a memorable touchstone of the era, an endlessly rewatchable sci-fi comedy that similar films should strive to imitate. Its 1989 sequel, however, is not worth defending, and efforts to make a third film sputtered out over creative differences and star Bill Murray’s outspoken disinterest in every script he was presented with. In short, it’s exactly the kind of franchise film studios look to revive: a well-remembered product that for one reason or another has fallen dormant.