I've been anxiously waiting for Ghostbusters: Afterlife ever since it was first announced that director Jason Reitman was making a sequel to his father Ivan Reitman's films Ghostbusters (watch it HERE) and Ghostbusters II (watch that one HERE). The wait has been longer than expected, due to the pandemic, and we still have seven months to go before Ghostbusters: Afterlife reaches theatres on November 11 – but according to franchise star Bill Murray, it's going to be worth the wait.
While being presented with the Maltin Modern Master Award at the 36th Santa Barbara International Film Festival, Murray mentioned that
Ivan’s son, Jason, did (a Ghostbusters movie). I remember him calling me and saying, “I’ve got an idea for another Ghostbusters. I’ve had this idea for years.” I thought, “What the heck could that possibly be?” I remember him when he was a kid. I remember his Bar Mitzvah. I was like, “What the heck? What does this kid know?” But he had a really, really wonderful idea that he wrote with another wonderful guy that I got to work with, Gil Kenan, who made City of Ember. The two of them wrote a Ghostbusters movie that really brings it back to life. It really has the feel of the first one, more than the second one or the girls’ one. It has a different feel than two out of four. I think he’s really got something.
Murray and his fellow original Ghostbusters Dan Aykroyd and Ernie Hudson don't have huge roles in Afterlife, but Murray went on to say that their appearance was a challenging one:
It was hard. It was really hard. That’s why I think it’s gonna be good. We were just in it for a little while, but it was physically painful. Wearing those packs is extremely uncomfortable. We had batteries the size of batteries. They now have batteries the size of earrings. It’s still a really heavy thing to wear, all the time. The special effects in this one are a lot of wind and dirt in your face, and there was a lot of going down and getting back up. I was like, “What is this? What am I doing? These are like Bulgarian deadlifts, or a Russian kettlebell, getting up and down with this thing on my back.” It was very uncomfortable. Usually, when something has a very high misery quotient, something comes of that and some quality is produced that, if you can capture it and project it, comes on the screen and affects you.
Scripted by Jason Reitman and Gil Kenan, Ghostbusters: Afterlife stars Mckenna Grace, Finn Wolfhard, and Carrie Coon as a family
with single mom Callie and her two kids, Trevor and Phoebe, who move into a beaten-down farmhouse in Oklahoma only to discover that there’s something strange in the neighborhood. Unexplained quakes shake the town. There’s an old mine nearby that bears the name of Ivo Shandor, who built the Manhattan high-rise in the 1984 film that channeled the forces of evil. Paul Rudd costars as a local teacher who’s been documenting the unexplained phenomena, befriending Callie and her kids, and helping make the connection between the current weirdness and the events of three decades before.
Also in the cast are Bokeem Woodbine, Tracy Letts, Celeste O'Connor, Logan Kim, Oliver Cooper, Sigourney Weaver, and Annie Potts.