It’s been almost a year since the Ghostbusters reboot hit theaters, and even though it garnered solid reviews (landing a 73% at Rotten Tomatoes and a little less impressive score of 60 at Metacritic), it only pulled in $ 229 million on a budget of $ 144 million, making it far from a big enough hit to warrant a sequel.
Since the movie’s release, there has been plenty of discussion about where the movie went wrong, but now Ghostbusters franchise creator, writer, producer and star Dan Ayrkoyd has spoken out about where he thinks the reboot (which he also produced) had problems. While speaking on the British morning show Sunday Brunch, Dan Aykroyd reiterated that he was happy with how the movie turned out, but placed blame for troubles behind the scenes, especially costly reshoots, on the shoulders of director Paul Feig.
Find out more about the Ghostbusters reshoots after the jump.
A British viewers captured the key part of the interview from Sunday Brunch with his phone (via ScreenRant):
Don't hold back, Dan. #Ghostbusters pic.twitter.com/WtZ0MbRsmk
— Ross Maclean (@ross_maclean) June 4, 2017
Since the audio is a little quiet, here’s what Dan Aykroyd had to say about the reboot in this clip:
“The girls are great in it. Kate McKinnon, Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig – what a wonderful, wonderful players they are – and Leslie Jones. I was really happy with the movie, but it cost too much. And Sony does not like to lose money. It made a lot of money around the world but just cost too much, making it economically not feasible to do another one. So that’s too bad – the director, he spent too much on it. He didn’t shoot scenes we suggested to him and several scenes that were going to be needed and he said “nah, we don’t need them”. Then we tested the movie and they needed them and he had to go back. About $ 30 to $ 40 million in reshoots. So he will not be back on the Sony lot any time soon.”
Ouch. That’s some pretty blunt, rough talk from Dan Aykroyd about Paul Feig’s work on the movie. However, it should be noted that Aykroyd doesn’t think that Paul Feig delivered a bad movie, but merely wasn’t being a cooperative collaborator when it came to taking suggestions from Dan Aykroyd and the rest of the “we” he’s referring to in the above quote. While reshoots are always part of any blockbuster movie’s production schedule and budget, they usually don’t cost $ 30 to $ 40 million, so Feig clearly made some mistakes along the way that made those reshoots necessary.
Personally, I don’t think all the blame for the budget and the lack of higher profits should be blamed on Paul Feig though. Sony Pictures decided to turn Ghostbusters into a tentpole and give it a blockbuster sized budget when it really didn’t need to be that big of a movie.
Part of what works about the original Ghostbusters is that it feels low key while still having some impressive sequences involving visual effects and action. But when it came to the reboot, Sony Pictures went all-in with a visual effects heavy story that placed too much emphasis on the spectacle rather than letting Paul Feig do what he’s done best with movies like Spy and The Heat, where the characters and comedy do the heavy lifting with some solid action in between. If Sony wanted to spend this much on a Ghostbusters reboot, they should have gotten a director who could manage it a bit better.
As for the future of the Ghostbusters franchise, there’s supposed to be an animated movie on the horizon, as well as “multiple movies” in development according to Ivan Reitman, but chatter of a sequel hasn’t been promising. However, if by some chance there does end up being a Ghostbusters reboot sequel, it sounds like Paul Feig won’t be part of it, even though he was holding out hope for one to happen.
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