Re: Aykroyd Comments on Murray, Ghostbusters 3! Working on Script w/Ra
Jeez, am I the only one excited for this? The revival of a long dead franchise should be a time for celebration; not a time to bash and moan. If the film sucks? You ignore it and wait for the inevitable RedLetterMedia review. If the film is awesome? Well, awesome.
The problem is that
Ghostbusters isn't a franchise (or at least it was never intended to be). The success of the first film is that its central idea is that four nuclear-powered hucksters somehow stumble into saving the world. It's a brilliant comedy first and foremost, with the sci-fi / horror elements aiding in building the joke. Ecto-1's design, for example, is a brilliant payoff. The whole movie is a happy accident in terms of how well it came together.
The only reason
Ghostbusters 2 exists in the first place is because Columbia saw
The Real Ghostbusters selling metric tons of toys, and it wanted some more of that sweet, sweet money, so they dumped trucks full of money on the principals' lawns and convinced them to come back. No one actually wanted to do the movie (outside of maybe Aykroyd), and it shows in the finished product, which seemingly everyone involved hates.
This is a movie that's been in development hell since about 1992, has never had a script that everyone has been happy with (Reitman had dropped out of development from 1999 - 2005ish because he hated what Aykroyd was pushing), Ramis hasn't made anything legitimately funny since some bits and pieces of
Analyze This, Aykroyd has lost the plot, and even Reitman seems to have blown his wad after
Evolution, which tried so desperately to be
Ghostbusters 3 itself.
It's not a movie crying out to be made because there's a great story waiting to be told. It's a movie that Sony wants to make because it wants more sweet, sweet merchandise money, and the only reason Ramis, Aykroyd and Reitman are involved in the first place is because the deal they made back in 1984 stipulates that they
have to be (or at least sign off on it), or else the movie can't go forward. If Sony could get rid of them, it would have, and we would have seen
Ghostbusters: The Remake out for the 25th anniversary a few years ago. We're not going to get a nostalgia trip of one last adventure with the guys -- we're going to get something that introduces a new crew that Sony can then sequelize to hell and back.