The long-awaited new trailer for Ghostbusters: Afterlife is here so who ya gonna call to break it down for you, IGN? Why, none other than the film’s co-writer and director, Jason Reitman! You can watch Reitman’s exclusive trailer breakdown via the player above or the embed below.
In the breakdown, Reitman sheds light on the Sony film’s plot while also keeping his cards close to the chest when it comes to revealing too much about its antagonist or how some of the original films’ cast factor into Afterlife.
“Historically, Ghostbusters movies were always about people going into business. It was about people starting a ghostbusting business together,” Reitman, son of the original two films’ director, Ivan Reitman, told IGN. “I suppose I knew immediately from the beginning that I wanted to make a movie about a family.”
The memory of original Ghostbuster Egon Spengler, played by the late Harold Ramis, looms large in Ghostbusters: Afterlife as the character has now passed away. “This is a movie about the Spengler family. And the Spengler family is disconnected. This movie is about why,” Reitman said.
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To help him craft this new Ghostbusters tale, Reitman teamed with Monster House filmmaker Gil Kenan to co-write the screenplay. In addition to making it a story about family, they also opted to place Afterlife in an entirely different setting for the franchise.
“Gil Kenan and I immediately wanted to establish a new location for Ghostbusters. Obviously, the franchise is synonymous with New York City, but we wanted to go someplace new. We wanted to go to the American West. We wanted to go to farmland. We wanted a new color palette. We wanted to start a new idea. And this is a film that is about discovery and it really is about a family retracing its roots.”
That journey also dictated how the narrative should be structured. “We wanted the movie to unfold like a mystery,” Reitman said. “Why is this family here? Who was their grandfather? Why did Egon come to this part of the country, to Summerville, Oklahoma, why this house? What is under the floor?”
Once the Egon connection is established in the movie, other familiar iconography from the original films is revealed: “Certainly, my connection with Ghostbusters always had to do with this ephemera. It was the packs, it was the traps, it was the car. And a lot of this film for me was the thrill of what it would be like to discover all these things in your home.”
But this wouldn’t be a Ghostbusters film without spooks, specters, or ghosts. That, however, got Reitman and Kenan to do a deep-dive on what makes the ghouls in a Ghostbusters film distinct. “Identifying the look and feel of Ghostbusters ghosts is actually really tricky. If you think about the ghosts that were in the original, and there was only a few,” Reitman recalled, citing Slimer, the librarian, the cabbie and a few others as examples. “And they look completely f******g different from each other.”
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“So what is it that connects Ghostbusters ghosts, right? What does it make them all of the same universe? And we spent I can’t even begin to tell you how many hours in long conversations over lunch, over dinner, trying to figure out what is it that makes a Ghostbusters ghost a Ghostbusters ghost.”
Their conversations yielded the creation of Muncher, Ghostbusters: Afterlife’s answer to the 1984 original’s Slimer. “We knew that he would be of the same free-floating class of Slimer. We knew that he would be just as old and tissuey and angry,” Reitman explained. “Something happened to Slimer over the years that people started thinking of him as the dalmatian of the firehouse. The original Slimer was an angry dude and very scary and we really wanted to get back to that.”
While there are hints and glimpses of the other original human characters in the new trailer, only Dan Aykroyd’s Ray Stantz and Annie Potts’ Janine Melnitz show up in the present during the trailer. Is Janine the mother of Carrie Coon’s character? All Reitman would offer is that “we get the sense that Janine is still connected to Egon Spengler. In the ’84 film, she was in love with him and clearly she still has a connection to him and that she was attempting to take care of him in his older age.”
Reitman was a bit more forthcoming about the return of Dr. Raymond Stantz, who the trailer reveals still runs his shop, Ray’s Occult Books, from Ghostbusters II. “For any fans of the ’89 film, they will recognize one of my favorite locations from that film that we recreated down to the detail, down to the smell, frankly. And you’ll recognize the red phone and you won’t recognize this tattoo on the arm of Ray Stantz.”
If you peer closely at the tattoo on Ray’s arm, it’s a nod to the Book of Revelations speech from the first Ghostbusters film. “Dan Aykroyd and I had talked about the possibility of him having a tattoo and something that maybe recognized the acts of 1984,” Reitman revealed. “And immediately came to us that we would speak to this conversation that Winston [Zeddemore] and Stantz have in Ecto-1 right at the height of the ’84 film.”
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Having spent time in his childhood on the sets of his father’s Ghostbusters films, Reitman is acutely aware of how much this franchise means to its fans because he shares their love and passion for it. “I’ve kept it a very close secret to my heart. And part of that is because I feel like I’m not really carrying the Spengler story, but I’m carrying my own family story,” Reitman said. “It’s been a long wait for me, as it has been for anyone who has anticipated the next Ghostbusters film. And I’m just thrilled to share it with everybody. It’s a movie that was made by a family about a family. My father and I cannot wait for you to see this in theaters.”
You can see Ghostbusters: Afterlife only in theaters when it opens in the US on November 11, in the UK on November 12, and in Australia on December 2.
Fans can also now download the new official Ghostbusters app (through the App Store and Google Play) for exclusive content, including photo filters, gifs, and the Ecto-1 AR Experience that puts the iconic car in your world via augmented reality.
