Ghostbusters: Afterlife and Juno Director Reveals He Worked on Scripts for Transformers Movie
Bestselling author Michael Chabon, who helped bring Jean-Luc Picard back to TV with the first season of Picard, is not alone in having done some work in Hasbro's writers' room over the years. In a new interview, Ghostbusters: Afterlife director Jason Reitman (who has earned accolades for his work on movies like Juno and Thank You For Smoking in years past) jumped at the chance to do some dialogue rewrites for Michael Bay's Transformers: Dark of the Moon and Transformers: Age of Extinction. He pointed out that while it might not be the gig people would have expected from him, it was nice to get out of his comfort zone.
That would seem to run in contrast to his taking the Ghostbusters gig, since his father was the director of the original. Instead, he explained that he resisted the call of the Ghostbusters franchise for years.
"It's very easy to look at a director and their work and think this is the sum total of that human being," Reitman told Insider. "The truth is I love horror films. I love big box office movies. To play in that Transformers world was like, I used to play with Transformers, now I get to play in Transformers."
"I would make the most boring 'Ghostbusters' movie,'" he told Howard Stern back in 2008, after the popularity of Juno had exploded and made him one of Hollywood's up-and-comers. "It would just be people talking about ghosts. There wouldn't be any ghost-busting in it."
Instead, the movie is rumored to be an Easter egg-packed nostalgia fest, giving the vocal fans who objected to the franchise's 2016 reboot what they wanted. The degree to which Ghostbusters, which hasn't had a blockbuster hit since the original installment in 1984, can hope to bring in the kind of revenue that modern blockbusters demand is still up in the air, and if it takes bringing back Bill Murray to do it, the question then becomes how Sony can move forward from there, since it's clear the original cast will not be coming back every couple of years to hunt more ghosts and make them more money. In the meantime, the reboot continuity has been abandoned (although in the comics from IDW Publishing, the two sets of Ghostbusters teamed up when it as discovered they were from parallel Earths).
Ghostbusters: Afterlife is set to star Carrie Coon, Finn Wolfhard, Mckenna Grace, Paul Rudd, Bokeem Woodbine, Celeste O'Connor, and Logan Kim. The movie is also expected to see the return of classic cast members such as Annie Potts, Sigourney Weaver, Ernie Hudson, Dan Aykroyd, and Bill Murray, all seemingly playing their original characters from the 1980s classics.
In Ghostbusters: Afterlife, when a single mom (Coon) and her two kids (Wolfhard, Grace) arrive in a small town, they begin to discover their connection to the original ghostbusters and the secret legacy their grandfather left behind.