Another “Ghostbusters” reboot will be arriving at a theater near you in the coming future, and guess what, the feminist remake from 2016 will be nothing more than a ghost of blunders past in this version.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, director Jason Reitman, son of the original “Ghostbusters” director Ivan Reitman, has been working in secret on a coming “Ghostbusters” sequel that will hopefully feature the original cast (RIP Egon) while continuing the saga.
“The filmmaker discreetly co-wrote a script with Gil Kenan, director of the animated movie ‘Monster House,’ and the pic is set to go into production this summer with an eye on a 2020 release,” reports THR. “The whole project has been under a veil of secrecy; the code name it has been operating under has been ‘Rust City.'”
Unlike the box office bomb that was the 2016 remake, Sony Pictures says this new iteration will be “the next chapter in the original story” that will be a passing of the torch to a new generation. No indication has been made, however, if the original cast will be reprising their roles. According to the description of the new film, it will ignore the 2016 storyline. Reitman reportedly will be looking to cast four teens, two boys and two girls, for the new team.
Most likely, Dan Aykroyd and Ernie Hudson will be on board to reprise their roles as Stantz and Winston to shepherd the new “Ghostbusters” team into a new era of roasting gargantuan marshmallow men in lower Manhattan. The big question, however, will be if Bill Murray will return as Peter Venkman. He seemed less-than-enthused about such a reprisal during pre-production on the last “Ghostbusters” movie. In the end, he made a cameo in the feminist “Ghostbusters” remake as a ghost skeptic named Martin Heiss. Nobody liked it.
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 thousand upvotes.
Even famed movie critic Richard Roeper agreed at the time that Sony made a bad decision to push an all-female cast with none of the original “Ghostbusters” in sight. Speaking on “The Adam Carolla Show” podcast, Roeper called the film a “horrifying mess” while suggesting that film critics were less than honest when reviewing it. It scored 73% on Rotten Tomatoes while receiving a 57% audience rating and a 5.3 on IMDB.
“I feel like I have pretty conclusive evidence that the people who do the [film] reviews lean a certain way politically, and that’s fine,” Carolla said. “They tend to be more liberal.”
“When they take a movie like ‘Ghostbusters’ and they put the all-female cast in there, I think they lean a little toward it. ‘Hey, this is empowering,’ even if the movie itself wasn’t as good as they would have liked,” Carolla continued. “They tend to give it a nod because they feel like it’s a step in the right direction, or this is progress, or I wanna be on the happy side of history.”
Roeper agreed with Carolla’s assertions while citing that he was actually attacked as a sexist on social media for giving it a poor review.
“I think you’re absolutely right, whether subconsciously or not,” said Roeper. “I find it hard to believe that after having sat through that dreck, that three quarters of the critics out there really saw that as a fine example of a reboot of a pretty classic, legendary motion picture. It was just bad.”