Ghostbusters: Afterlife writer-director Jason Reitman says extra time on the new movie has been “extraordinarily valuable” after the threequel, follow-up to father Ivan Reitman’s original Ghostbusters and Ghostbusters II, was delayed from summer to spring 2021 amid the coronavirus pandemic. Originally planned for July 10, the new movie reunites Ghostbusters stars Dan Aykroyd, Ernie Hudson, Annie Potts, Sigourney Weaver, and Bill Murray when the family of the late Egon Spengler (Harold Ramis) — single mother Callie (Carrie Coon) and her two children, science whiz Phoebe (Mckenna Grace) and gearhead Trevor (Finn Wolfhard) — discover their connection to the original Ghostbusters and their grandfather’s secret legacy.
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“I can’t tell you anything, but we are working on another installment,” Reitman said Monday during a Zoom reunion between the original Ghostbusters cast. “We have a little bit more time, and look, as a director, I’ve never had this opportunity to actually take a pause and breathe and look at the movie again.”
That time has been “extraordinarily valuable,” the Juno filmmaker added. “We have a lot of time now.” Asked to reveal how he’s handling coronavirus quarantines, Reitman said, “I’ve been spending my days editing Ghostbusters, so that’s where I’ve been.”
Reitman previously described the movie as a love letter to both his father and the franchise, particularly the 1984 original.
“I was seven years old, so I was just as thrilled by just being on set and being around crew and cast and people who woke up every morning and had this kind of circus life just to make a movie every day,” Reitman recalled on Reunited Apart. “But in addition to that, it was special effects, and it was puppets, and it was giant bags of fake marshmallow that they would dump on somebody, and it was seeing a terror dog puppeteered to life.”
Some of those artists returned to work on Afterlife after being reassembled by Reitman, who unearthed original dailies from the first movie while mining the Ghostbusters archives.
“We reached out to all the originals — the cast, the crew, the people who made [Ghostbusters] — and we even formed this kind of small group that gets together, an advisory board of people who worked on the original film, to make sure that we make the right film,” Reitman said during Ghostbusters Fan Fest in June 2019.
Afterlife “takes the real DNA from the first two movies and transfers that directly to the third, the next generation,” Aykroyd, producer on the new movie, said during a November appearance on The Greg Hill Show. The franchise co-creator added Reitman’s sequel “hands the legacy off to a new generation of stars, and players, and actors, and characters.”
Ghostbusters: Afterlife now opens in theaters March 5, 2021.
