Over the past few weeks, a huge number of Ghost in the Shell clips have arrived on YouTube, but is it too little, too late?
At this point, there are a lot of questions surrounding Ghost in the Shell and how much of an audience it might capture when it hits theaters on March 31. That’s just one week to build up anything remotely resembling steam. Considering the fact that its marketing campaign inspired little more than mockery, and that fans are probably still stinging from the change to Major Motoko Kusanagi’s name, things don’t look great, necessarily.
However, Paramount Pictures hasn’t yet given up on its remake yet, and, if you look at the official YouTube channel, you’ll see that over the past month or so, almost all of the clips are for Ghost in the Shell. If it’s not Ghost in the Shell, then it’s Baywatch, Transformers: The Last Knight, or the already-released Rings. (No comment on the quality of any of the aforementioned movies.)
However, most of the recent clips haven’t managed to crack even one million views. Some of the most recent ones haven’t crossed the 10000-view mark. To compare to another American remake of an anime, the first teaser for Netflix’s Death Note has over five million views and dropped on March 22, the same day as several Ghost in the Shell clips.
Granted, that was the first thing we’ve seen for Death Note. Meanwhile, we’ve seen perhaps too much of Scarlett Johansson’s Major, who doesn’t even get a the ahead of the military title. In fact, Paramount dropped nearly five minutes of the actual movie:
As of this writing, it has just about 100,000 views. That doesn’t seem that great.
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Will Ghost in the Shell make it at the box office, or will it be crushed by the behemoth that is Beauty and the Beast (albeit in its third week at that point)?
Right now, our money is on the Disney princess. Sorry, Major.