Sometimes you have to leave a good thing alone. Sometimes once is enough. Sometimes you really can’t go home again.
Tell that to Dan Aykroyd, who made an appearance on a country music station and announced that a Ghostbusters III is happening. Despite Ghostbusters II.
Aykroyd told the DJ that the new film would be a CGI movie, which was the only way they could convince Bill Murray to come back (I guess his Garfield experience has shown him how easy it is to sit in a studio for a day or two and collect a big check). He also says that CGI will allow them to make the new Ghostbusters as big as the original script he wrote for the first one, back when it was meant to star John Belushi.
Ghostbusters III: Hellbent would see the boys going to hell itself, which looks a lot like Manhattan. "We go to the hell side of Manhattan, downtown, Foley Square. It’s all where the cops are–they are all blue minotaurs. Central Park is this huge peat mine with green demons there, surrounded by black onyx thousand-foot high apartment buildings with classic red devils, very wealthy. We go and visit a Donald Trump-like character who is Mr. Sifler. Luke Sifler. Lu-cifer. So we meet the devil in it.”
Here’s the thing about Aykroyd’s original Ghostbusters script: it’s supposed to be a mess. The Ghostbusters traveled across dimensions and fought a succession of huge ghosts, of which Stay-Puft was only one. Ivan Reitman worked with Aykroyd to turn the script into something not only filmable, but something classic, one of the all-time great comedy movies. A huge explosion filled CGI movie doesn’t initially sound like a return to the greatness of the original.
And then there’s the second film, which proved that you can’t always catch lightning in a bottle twice. Ghostbusters II is passable, and for fans it even has moments, but it pales in comparison with the first. Do we need a movie that pales in comparison to the second?