Thanks to the free market, Sony Pictures has finally been forced to admit its all-female Ghostbusters remake/reboot was a catastrophe, and this admission arrives in the starkest way possible: Sony announced it has been forced to once again reboot Ghostbusters, and this reboot will have nothing to do with the studio’s disastrous 2016 attempt to use its beloved Ghostbusters franchise as a social justice statement.
According to the Hollywood Reporter, director Jason Reitman (son of original director Ivan Reitman) has been given the green light to bring to life a script he co-wrote, and as of now, the studio is looking for a summer 2020 release date.
From the sounds of it, Sony has decided to pretend 2016’s creative and financial catastrophe never happened. This new chapter will be “the next chapter in the original story [that] continues the narrative of the 1980s classic.”
Officially, then it is not a reboot, but it actually kind of is.
Variety reports that the newest chapter will be titled Ghostbusters 3 and be a direct sequel to Ghostbusters 1 and 2.
“Insiders say this film will be a continuation of the 1984 sequel and will not be connected to the 2016 film. Sources couldn’t say if that means that the original cast members will be back, as exact story details are still being kept under wraps but sources say Reitman has begun testing teenagers for four mystery roles.”
Here is the teaser that was just released:
So no word yet on the status of the original cast (Dan Akroyd, Ernie Hudson, Bill Murray), but “Reitman is on the lookout to cast four teens in the movie, two boys and two girls.”
What? Two boys? You mean guys will be allowed in this time? How’s that for a civil rights victory!
All of this is not only a massive setback for the studio that planned on multi-platforming the hell out of that remake; it is also a major defeat for the stifling, joyless nonsense that is social justice, something that simply cannot survive the mass market. By and large, the American people are not on board with oppressive lecturing and posturing in entertainment, nor do they buy this anti-science approach to gender.
Nevertheless, the failure of the 2016 Ghostbusters remake had zippo to do with Sony’s decision to hand the lead roles over to women. Starting with 1940’s His Girl Friday and working straight through to last year’s Ocean’s 8 and Overboard and Marvel’s upcoming Captain Marvel (which is going to be a smash), audiences have accepted and will continue to accept gender-flip movies … if they are done correctly.
Paul Feig’s Ghostbusters remake didn’t crash-dive because Americans are sexist; it crash-dived because a cherished 30-year-old franchise was launched as an in-your-face social statement, as a cannonball in the phony war against the patriarchy. Who wants to sit through that? Who wants to watch four female millionaires pose as victims, and do it during a freakin’ Ghostbusters movie?
It’s one thing to launch your movie in that manner, but this strident and divisive approach bled into the actual movie, which — if we are all honest, including those critics who gave it a ridiculous 74 percent fresh rating at Rotten Tomatoes — just wasn’t very good.
Man alive, what a joyless slog Ghostbusters (2016) is.
For those of you who have not seen it — and I know I speak for legions — it opens with a “joke” mocking then-candidate Donald Trump’s border wall — and never recovers… All the men are jerks or dimwits (when the women in the original are classy and savvy), the villain is created by bullying… And that’s not even the worst of it. In the original, Ernie Hudson is a dignified member of the team who happens to be black. The regressive remake gives Leslie Jones (who is also black) a stereotyped, feets-don’t-fail-me-now, wise-cracking, soul sister role.
So here was a movie preening its moral superiority over the rest of us while bathing in a tired racial stereotype that reaches back to Mantan Moreland in those old Charlie Chan movies.
When we go to the movies, we go to feel something, not to be lectured to, or to be told what to feel. Secondly, a vast majority of Americans hate political correctness and know all this talk about women and minorities, or whomever, still being oppressed is a load of hooey. Finally, no matter how hard the news media, academia, social media, and Hollywood try, we normal people are hunkering down and sniggering at this stupid fad about gender being a “social construct” and waiting for it to pass.
There is another problem with the overall Ghostbusters franchise, though, which has nothing to do with politics, and that is a simple concept (guys fight ghosts to save the world) that doesn’t lend itself to a movie universe or world building.
All you can really do is remake the same movie over and over again with bigger special effects. The lackluster Ghostbusters II, which is as close as anyone will ever come to bottling lightning again, proved that.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.