Producer Ivan Reitman Wants ‘Ghostbusters’ to Go International
There are two competing narratives surrounding Paul Feig’s 2016 Ghostbusters remake. On the one hand, fans of the original films were irrationally upset to see Hollywood give their (suddenly untouchable) films an all-female cast. For them, the film was a deserved flop. On the other hand, countless stories were written about a new generation of female Ghostbusters fans who were thrilled to see the movie reach out to new audiences. These fans believe the movie did more than enough to warrant sequels. And while the box office numbers and critical scores didn’t signal the slam-dunk hit that most fans were looking for, it sounds like the producers side in the second camp, with Ivan Reitman promising earlier this year that he was hard at work weaving together a cohesive universe from the games, movies, and animated films.
That seems to be part of Reitman’s overall ambitious plans for Ghostbusters longterm. On a recent episode of Super News Live (via /Film), Ernie Hudson and Reitman stopped by for a talk about the future of the franchise and how the Ghostbusters remake could eventually plug into the original films. As part of their talk, Reitman discussed his idea to franchise Ghostbusters for different international markets:
What we’ve been doing a lot of is thinking about the franchise rights for Ghostbusters. Because Ghostbusters, that idea doesn’t have to just take place in New York, it can happen over the world. I think it would be really cool to see Korean ghosts or Chinese ghosts. All those great traditions in the world have all these tales and things those people are afraid of. To have a sort of local group of Ghostbusters that tie with the head office in New York would be fun.
At the risk of angering the Ghostbros — provided they didn’t stop reading ScreenCrush ages ago — this seems like a pretty interesting approach for the film series. The Ghostbusters premise is a pretty simple one: take a few well-regarded comedians, throw in some CGI ghosts, and let fun happen onscreen. Not only would that idea lend itself well to different film markets, we’d also get to see how different filmmakers bring their countries’ ghost mythology into the film. As any horror buff knows, a ghost movie in Japan is very different from a ghost movie in Ireland, and seeing the regional spin on the Ghostbusters for each country could be a pretty fun experiment for everyone involved. Color me intrigued.