Dan Aykroyd updates Ghostbusters 3 and potential stories beyond

Last Updated on August 5, 2021

Great, another day, another sad pitch to get a 3rd GHOSTBUSTERS film made. I love you Danny, but damn, you gotta know when to hold ’em…

Mr. Aykroyd recently caught up with Esquire Magazine, and as always, couldn’t get through a conversation without GHOSTBUSTERS 3 being brought up. To be fair to Danny, he didn’t broach the subject, but gladly responded with candor as to where the picture lies. According to him, he’s deeply involved in the film, and Sony still has it as a priority. Bill Murray on the other hand? Like most of us (even ardent fans), he left this sucker behind back in 1989.

Quote time, here’s what DA confessed to Esquire:

“I’m as deeply inside Ghostbusters 3 as anyone involved in the project — that includes the executives at Sony, who have to go to sleep at night and have to decide to do it. Ivan Reitman, the director, who travels from Santa Barbara to L.A., and has for the last three years, working with writers to put it together. [The Office writers] Gene Stupnitsky and Lee Eisenberg, who worked on one of the drafts.”

“I’ve worked on every draft in the last three years, as Ivan has, and now we have a story and a draft that everybody seems to agree would make the third movie. At this point, I think we’re closer than we ever have been. And because of the ever-shifting sands and nature of the motion-picture business, I will just say that hopefully, at some point, it will be morphing into what is known in the business as a [Aykroyd mimes air quotes] “production number XP39789.” Then I will begin to rent cars, get hotel rooms, and bill for writing. But that point hasn’t come. All my work has been gratis to this point, as Ivan’s has, and I’m hoping that I can get that production number set up in L.A. and help everyone bring the movie to fruition, as the originator and creator of the concept. If it does not happen, the life of Dan Aykroyd and his family and friends will be quite full without Ghostbusters 3.”

After that, words like lawyers, arbitration, abrogation and the like are bandied about. Not too impressive. Aykroyd did muse about a potential GHOSTBUSTERS movie beyond part 3:

“Man-hell-ttan, and the Ghostbusters in hell, would be so solid, but we gotta get maybe one or two made before that. But, oh, wow… I wrote that with Tom Davis, my writing partner, recently deceased, who wrote Coneheads with me and stuff on Saturday Night Live. There’s classic Tom Davis lines and funny stuff in there, really it’s probably the most humorous of all the Ghostbusters scripts that have generated in that last little while. But we’ll put the humor into this next one. It’s gotta be funny, or it’s not worth doing. It can be scary, it can be Ghostbusters, it can be the new franchise, the new people, but if it’s not funny… Wait a minute, it started as a comedy. Let’s make sure there’s laughs and no laugh unturned and that we really make that our priority, to make it funny and exciting, but mainly funny.”

Anyone laughing? For more, HERE’S the entire interview. Peruse it and let us know what you make of all this noise.