Tuesday night, while we were at a screening of Glass (review coming soon), an Entertainment Weekly exclusive revealed Sony’s upcoming plans for the Ghostbusters franchise — specifically, that they had hired Jason Reitman, son of original Ghostbusters director Ivan, to direct a sequel to or spinoff of the original films — and, on Wednesday, the publication dropped a brief teaser for the project as a kind of proof-of-concept. It’s spooky, it’s nostalgic, and it’s probably going to rip the internet in half. More on that in a minute, however, you’ve got to watch some dude fiddle around with a proton pack in a barn for 50-something seconds.
Here’s the teaser:
That’s definitely a very mild look at what’s to come, given that nobody’s cast in it yet and they’re probably a few months out from beginning production on it, but you get a good idea: It’s the heir apparent returning to claim his birthright after a series of disappointments, the prodigal son returning to the warm embrace of his family’s legacy after making the one-two punch of Tully and The Front Runner in the same year. It will probably be competently made, but hollow, much like all of Reitman’s work is, and it’ll make shareholders happy that there won’t be so much controversy around the property this time.
And that controversy — specifically the abuse heaped upon those excited for Paul Feig’s reboot of the franchise in the lead-up and aftermath of its release — is entirely the reason why we’re finding it very hard to be excited about any of this. Sure, Feig’s movie wasn’t very good, but its intentions were, and the outraged response to it sort of established ugly rules of engagement for those dissatisfied with a company’s attempts to expand their franchise’s audience.
That fed into what we saw with The Last Jedi, which in turn is going to feed into whatever the next conflict winds up being about and so on and so forth. People are going to receive death threats, actors are going to be bullied off of social media, and the Internet will continue to be revealed to be a colossal mistake, given that we can’t use it responsibly.
Jason Reitman’s Ghostbusters will hit theaters in the summer of 2020.
Featured image by CTMG via ‘Entertainment Weekly’.