Dan Aykroyd says a whole lot of everything in regards to the upcoming Ghostbusters reboot. I say reboot because at this stage that is what it is looking like. According to a new interview the franchise producer did with Metro UK, the third installment of the series will serve to pass the baton to the next generation which essentially means a new, younger cast is definitely in the cards.
This is something he said before, so we can pretty much report it as fact, but what this now means though is that the Bill Murray hold-out problem has essentially gone away. They no longer need the original films’ biggest start to return and that is a huge revelation that should serve to push this thing forward with its new writer Etan Cohen (Tropic Thunder.) Of course, that will all come down to whether the script is good enough although it appears like a certainty that Columbia is hell-bent on making this thing happen come hell or high water.
Let us not forget this is one of the few franchises that did not fizzle out after being milked to saturation. Ghostbusters had two offerings with the first largely better in quality (and box office dollars) than the first, but both films grossed over $200 million worldwide in the 80′s when such heights were tough to come by.
This is oddly reminiscent of Sony’s approach to bringing back Jumanji which was another successful property that largely had money left on the table from yesteryear. That may sound ridiculous, but it is a strategy nonetheless that Sony has adopted so the question now turns to…what other properties have they not mined in a while because obviously the studio’s execs are looking hard at rebooting them all.