Paul Feig, the director of the female-led Ghostbusters reboot, has blamed the anti-Hillary Clinton movement during the last US presidential election for the film’s poor box office performance.

The 2016 movie starred Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, Kate McKinnon and Leslie Jones. It earned $229.1m (£187.5m) at the worldwide box office. Before the release, Feig had said “a movie like this has to at least get to like $500m worldwide, and that’s probably low”.

Speaking in a new interview on Jess Cagle’s SiriusXM show, Feig said: “I think some really brilliant author needs to write a book about 2016 and how intertwined we were with Hillary [Clinton] and the anti-Hillary movement.

“Everyone was at a boiling point. I don’t know if it was having an African American president for eight years that they were teed up, they were just ready to explode.”

He continued: “It’s crazy how people got nuts about women trying to be empowered or be in positions they weren’t normally in, and it was an ugly, ugly year.”

Feig also discussed Donald Trump’s rant about the movie after it was announced in 2015, in which he criticised it for having “only women”.

“By the time I announced I was going to do it, it started,” said Feig.

The backlash to the film having a female-led cast meant its IMDb page YouTube videos received low ratings prior to it coming out in cinemas.

When the first promo for the reboot came out, it became the most disliked trailer in YouTube’s history.

Jones, who starred as Patty Tolan in the film, was forced to quit Twitter because of the racist and sexist abuse she suffered after its release.