As the secretive new “Ghostbusters 3” continues in the works, the franchise darling Bill Murray says he’s game for a new ride-around on the Ecto-1.
“This franchise paid for my son’s college,” Murry told Indiewire at the Cannes Film Festival this week. “We made this thing. We are the caretakers of it. It’s a great thing and it was a really fun movie to make. It’s a real movie with some really funny stuff in it.”
Murray added that his great connection to franchise was the wonderful relationships he made with the people involved and he never really had a relationship with the studio. “They’re wonderful people,” he said. “Danny [Ackroyd], Ernie [Hudson], Harold [Ramis], Rick Moranis, Annie Potts — they’re some of the coolest people and they had real careers. They treat people well. They really understand what it is to be a movie actor. It’s a complete collaboration.”
“The relationship you have with those people as collaborators is not necessarily the relationship I have with Sony,” he continued. “For years, they said, ‘We can’t make another “Ghostbusters” because Bill Murray won’t change the deal he made in 1984.’ Well, no, I never did. And you know what? They made the movie. You’re the new guys, I’m the old guy. It was good enough for the other people so it’s going to have to be good enough for you.”
The actor who will forever be remembered as Peter Venkman expressed little interest in returning to a third “Ghostbusters” installment throughout the years but ultimately did end up with a cameo in the all-female version as a ghost skeptic named Martin Heiss. Murray told Indiewire he agreed to that due to his friendship with castmembers Melissa McCarthy and Kate McKinnon.
“I was in that movie just because they asked me, and I knew if I said no, I was saying I didn’t support that movie,” Murray said. “I felt like, OK, I’m going to support them because I support them as people. So I did that one and I would do this next one.”
Murray added how things have changed in the big studio world where bosses are probably more focused on an actor’s Twitter followers than anything else.
“The big studio movies now have their own computer-generated way of doing things and formula that they use,” said Murray. “I think they really do crunch the numbers of how many Twitter followers we have, and all that stuff. I think that actually is a factor, but since I have no Twitter followers, I’m not a bankable person in their world. I’m a big negative on a movie.”
While (largely left-leaning) critics appreciated the 2016 all-female remake, the film failed to capture audiences and grossed a tepid $229 million worldwide, which seems pretty solid until factoring in marketing costs and its massive production budget of $144 million.
Starting with the release of its first trailer, the 2016 “Ghostbusters” immediately became a political hot topic when it broke records by becoming the most disliked movie trailer on YouTube. Today, it still holds 1.1 million downvotes versus just 305,000 upvotes.
Director Jason Reitman angered feminists everywhere when he promised that this new movie will be giving the franchise back to the fans by continuing with the original timeline of the original “Ghostbusters” universe.