Yesterday, director Paul Feig gave an interview to Entertainment Weekly in which he explained—not a little defensively—his plans to reboot Ghostbusters with an entirely new, all-female cast and no connection to the films that came before. It definitely won’t be the last such interview. In the eight years that I’ve been covering entertainment news for this site, nothing—not the threat of new Star Wars or Batman, not any of the countless remakes or reboots we cover daily—has produced more ire than the specter of another Ghostbusters, much of it coming directly from me. And Feig understands better than anyone, with the possible exception of J.J. Abrams, that he has a long road ahead of convincing people like me of his intentions—or, at least, calming us down—as he proceeds through these next, difficult steps. He may as well have told us he’s marrying all of our mothers.
Like many of my generation, Ghostbusters isn’t just a movie for me; it’s in my DNA. The year it was released on video was the same year my parents divorced, and the same year I was skipped ahead out of second grade, uprooting me from everything I’ve ever known. And in that tumultuous, friendless time, Ghostbusters was always there. As I wore that VHS into a tracking line-filled mess, Peter Venkman, Ray Stantz, and Egon Spengler (sorry, Winston) became like foster fathers to me. Recognizing in them kindred, nerdy outsiders, I absorbed bits of their personalities as my own: Venkman’s almost sociopathic inability to take any situation seriously; Ray’s goofy enthusiasm for things no one else cares about; Egon’s dry, deadpan detachment. Even now, they are a part of me, as real as any family. And just like family, the last thing I want is to watch them get old and die.
Amid the uproar over an all-female reboot, it’s easy to forget that, for more than two decades now, that’s been the threat of any new Ghostbusters movie. Back in 2010, Dan Aykroyd—the black heart of the Ghostbusters 3 movement, ladies and gentlemen—kicked off four years of existential dread by saying he wanted to make a movie that would find the Ghostbusters handing it off to a younger generation, due to their own advanced decrepitude. “My character’s eyesight is shot, I got a bad knee, a bad hip—I can’t drive that caddy anymore or lift that Psychotron Accelerator anymore, it’s too heavy,” Aykroyd said of these plans to check in on our beloved heroes to see how age had rendered them feeble as horses waiting to be put down. Hey, fantastic. As long as I’m being reunited with the things I loved to see how time has utterly destroyed them, why don’t we dig up my childhood pets?
We’ve watched as Aykroyd’s passion has turned to zealotry, as steadfast as his belief that space aliens are angry about 9/11 and that we should arrest them—and equally as grounded in reality. After Bill Murray made it clear he’s about as eager to make a third Ghostbusters as he is a third Garfield, Aykroyd insisted, well, they could just do it without him. After the death of Harold Ramis and Ivan Reitman distancing himself, Aykroyd remained determined. Hell, even Rick Moranis and Ernie Hudson expressed their doubts that another one should or even could be made, and yet Aykroyd has always remained undeterred, musing aloud about dream casts to anyone who will listen. One imagines he spends his nights whispering plot details to his bottles of Crystal Skull, taking their rictus grins as signs of encouragement.
And that’s the sad reality: Another Ghostbusters movie is inevitable. Even if Aykroyd had a chilling moment of clarity, perhaps after catching Blues Brothers 2000 on cable, the push to revive it is—even by Aykroyd’s own admission—bigger than any one of them or of us. Ghostbusters is a dormant franchise in an age where such a thing is not allowed, where its parent company Sony rebooted Spider-Man twice in a decade and is ready to do it a third time if need be. No matter how many rejected scripts or surely unnerving meetings with Aykroyd its executives have endured—no matter how many withering blog articles they’ve read condemning the project—no one has come close to pulling the plug entirely. Somehow, “Let’s Just Not Do It” has never been considered as an option. Which is why, while it’s definitely not better than nothing, a total Ghostbusters reboot may be the best possible scenario.
“Ghostbusters is such a great thing and everybody knows it, and it’s such a great world. It’s a shame to just let this thing sit there,” Feig explains to EW. And while one can quibble with whether it would actually be a shame to just leave it alone, the most reassuring thing about Feig’s take is just that. He will let Ghostbusters just sit there, by making a movie that will have almost nothing to do with Ghostbusters.
As Feig explains, his film will take place in a reality where the first two didn’t even happen. It’s a world that hasn’t been witness to the comings of Gozer or Vigo The Carpathian, or any other major supernatural events that, 25 years later, would have rendered the act of busting ghosts as commonplace as catching mice. The Ghostbusters team we know and love aren’t old men robbed of their powers and charm; in fact, they don’t even exist. Feig adds that, if any of the cast members do want to return, he would welcome them, but “it would just be in different roles now”—an edict I’m guessing could prove difficult to stick to, should Murray come sniffing around. But for now, all that remains is the basic Ghostbusters premise of friends trying to launch a business in which they investigate the dubious existence of paranormal phenomena. That and the name.