Paul Feig’s Ghostbusters Reboot Won’t Feature The Original Characters
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Yesterday we got confirmation that Paul Feig will in fact direct Ghostbusters 3, and that it will indeed feature an all female core group. We also learned that Katie Dippold, who worked with Feig on The Heat, will write the script with him. As you can imagine, they’ve probably known this for a while before they could reveal it to fans, and probably have a lot to say on the matter. For his part, Feig has chimed in, talking about the cast, the reboot-y nature of the project, and the possibility of the original players making an appearance, among other things.
For may of us, Feig first came to our attention as the creator of the gone-to-soon Freaks and Geeks, which was cancelled by its network after a single partial season (sci-fi fans can certainly relate to both the show and the fact that it got the axe prematurely). More recently, he has had a great deal of success with movies like Bridesmaids and The Heat, comedies with female-fronted casts. Talking to EW, he discussed this, saying:
My favorite thing to do is work with funny women. I was like, what if it was an all female cast? If they were all women? Suddenly, my mind kind of exploded: that would be really fun. And then I thought, well, what if we just make it new? It’s not coming into the world that existed before. It’s always hard if the world has gone through this big ghost attack, how do you do it again? I wanted to come into our world where there’s talk of ghosts but they’re not really credible, and so what would happen in our world if this happened today?
Since we first heard that the cast could be all women, there have been a number of potential names bandied about, including many Feig has worked with previously. The highest profile among these were the four that original Ghostbuster Bill Murray mentioned a while back, a list that includes Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, Emma Stone, and Linda Cardellini. About this list Feig says:
It’s an awesome cast. I’ve got a lot of ideas on that but nobody set in stone. That’s part of the fun for me is figuring out what’s the best combo, what’s going to be relevant and fun. Bottom line: I just want the best, funniest cast. For me it’s just more of a no-brainer. I just go, ‘what would make me excited to do it?’ I go: four female Ghostbusters to me is really fun. I want to see that dynamic.
We all know that Murray is in no rush to return to the franchise, but many others, especially Dan Aykroyd and Ernie Hudson, have expressed their opinions on the matter, and Feig says, “Those are my comedy heroes. So as far as I’m concerned, anybody wants to come back I welcome with open arms. It would just be in different roles now, but it would be fun to figure out how to do that.” As this is a new origin story, how they might handle that remains a mystery, but you have to imagine they can make it happen.
Ghostbusters 3, or whatever it winds up being called now, has gone through many incarnations, with numerous people attached in various capacities. The LEGO Movie directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller turned it down after Harold Ramis’ death and Ivan Reitman dropped out, and while Feig was reluctant, not wanting to mess it up, he decided that the best way to avoid that was to start anew. He says:
I love the first one so much I don’t want to do anything to ruin the memory of that. So it just felt like, let’s just restart it because then we can have new dynamics. I want the technology to be even cooler. I want it to be really scary, and I want it to happen in our world today that hasn’t gone through it so it’s like, oh my God what’s going on?
And if you’re worried about Feig screwing this up, he has plans to hopefully ensure that doesn’t happen, and also has plans to keep it from being just another rehash. He says:
It’s not going to be, here is the exact same stuff. It’s also not going to go, screw you, if you like that stuff, it’s all completely different. We’re going to have fun with it, but again, bring it into our time period… If we just flop four women into the exact same personalities and roles as original, then that’s lazy filmmaking on my behalf, and who wants to see that? It’s the difficult thing about remaking a great movie. So that’s why we’re not remaking a great movie. We’re doing our take on it.
One thing Feig does hope to accomplish in this new movie is to make it scary. That is one of the goals he and Dippold have in writing the script. He says:
Both she and I are obsessed with how do we make comedy really scary? I think funny people in peril and in danger is one of the best forms of comedy, and I really like things to play very real while funny things are happening. So that’s what both Katie and I really want to do with this one is make it crazy funny but also you’re scared at the same time.
So what do you think? Is a Paul Feig-directed, female-fronted Ghostbusters reboot a good idea? Or should they have left well enough alone?
