There’s a new trend in Hollywood to reboot a franchise in a way that acknowledges its history. 2018’s Halloween pits Laurie Strode’s granddaughter against Michael Myers. Star Wars: The Force Awakens introduces Rey as the galaxy’s new hero in awe that the myths about Luke Skywalker are true. And Ghostbusters: Afterlife, one of the many planned 2020 movie releases that got pushed back by COVID-19, is set to do something along those lines both in front of and behind the camera: it features the old cast passing on the torch to a new generation of ‘busters, and it’s being directed by Jason Reitman, the son of the original’s director, Ivan Reitman.
As much as Jason Reitman hopes to please diehard Ghostbusters fans with his new movie, his dad’s opinion is the one that mattered the most. After the movie industry was put on hold for months, Reitman was finally able to screen his new film for audiences in December – and his father was on the guest list. The director told Empire, “My father hasn’t been leaving the house much because of COVID, but he took a test, put on a mask, and drove down to the Sony lot to watch the movie with the studio. And after [it ended], he cried, and he said, ‘I’m so proud to be your father.’ And it was one of the great moments of my life.”
The younger Reitman’s film won’t take place in New York City like his dad’s original movies or Paul Feig’s all-female 2016 reboot, but rather in Summerville, Oklahoma, where the Ghostbusters and the “Manhattan Crossrip of 1984” have become legendary. In addition to Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Ernie Hudson, Sigourney Weaver, and Annie Potts all reprising their original roles, Ghostbusters: Afterlife will star Mckenna Grace, Finn Wolfhard, Carrie Coon, and Paul Rudd as new characters.
The main genre that the Ghostbusters franchise is associated with is comedy, thanks to the classic ad-libs of Murray, Aykroyd, and Ramis, and Jason Reitman certainly wants to make Afterlife funny, but he’s as eager to make it scary. He said that the first movie was “really my first experience with a horror film,” and mentioned a DGA meeting in which Steven Spielberg told him that the library ghost in the opening scene of Ghostbusters is one of the “top 10 scares of all time.”
Originally, Ghostbusters: Afterlife was slated to hit U.S. theaters on July 10, 2020, but Sony delayed it to March 5, 2021, when it became apparent that the pandemic wasn’t going away any time soon. It’s currently set to be released on June 11. That date is subject to another delay, of course, but with the vaccine being rolled out, fingers crossed that moviegoing will be back to normal by the summer.
Source: Empire