‘Ghostbusters’ Producer Says There Are Still Plans for More Movies in Development
While last summer’s Ghostbusters didn’t get off to a very auspicious start, due to “My childhood!”-wailing Internet trolls and bad box office numbers coupled with the fact that the movie has its hilarious moments but was just fine overall, that doesn’t mean we’ll never see Gilbert, Patty, Yates, and Holtzmann onscreen again. In fact, the studio has a number of films in development, according to Ghostbusters’ producer Ivan Reitman (who also produced the 1984 version).
While speaking with io9 about the new Ghostbusters VR experience, Reitman said he wished the 2016 movie had been better received.
We certainly would’ve loved to have a larger hit. But considering the last film was almost 30 years ago, it really did extremely well. I think the film cost too much, frankly, and that’s the real issue. I personally had other points of view in terms of where the film should go and it was kind of a continuous conversation with Paul [Feig] about that. But Paul was the filmmaker on this one and he’s a very talented director. I wanted to give him enough room to do the film he thought it should be.
The Ghostbusters universe is currently working on an animated movie scheduled for 2019, and a crossover comic that sees the four women from the new movie meet their 1984 counterparts. Plus, all four of the leads from last year’s movie have sequels in their contracts, which are mostly there because Sony expected their movie to be a hit. While it definitely wasn’t, that doesn’t mean Reitman is giving up on them.
We jumped into an animated film [after the last movie] and we are developing live-action films. I want to bring all these stories together as a universe that makes sense within itself. Part of my job right now is to do that.
This echoes Reitman’s statements from back in November, when he said that there were plans for “many” more Ghostbusters movies, so at least he and Sony are on the same page still. While pretty much everyone is just about sick of all the cinematic universes popping up out of nowhere these days, I’d be interested to see where they plan to take these ladies next. It certainly wouldn’t take that much for a modern Ghostbusters 2 to be better than its 1989 predecessor.