Luke Owen looks at the franchise potential of Ghostbusters…
The second week numbers are in, and it’s what most people expected (at least it’s what I predicted on last week’s podcast). After a fairly decent (but not all that great) $46 million opening weekend, Paul Feig’s Ghostbusters reboot dropped 54% to earn $21 million in its second week. Which, in fairness to it, held up pretty well against great openings for Star Trek Beyond and Lights Out, and the animated behemoth The Secret Life of Pets (which continues to make baffling big money).
Who is to blame for the mediocre performance? Was it all the pre-release negativity from misogynistic Twitter and Reddit users? Did the over-bearing Ghostbusters defenders put off potential other movie goers? Is America not ready for an all-female horror comedy? Or are we just sick of cash-grab reboots in general?
All are valid questions, but only one really matters: will Sony make a sequel?
Ghostbusters now sits at $86 million domestic (as of today) and $122 million worldwide after two weeks. With a production budget of $144 million and a reported marketing budget of $100 million (according to Variety, though other sources claim it’s as high as the budget), Sony and their investors will want to make around $400 million worldwide in order to break even. However Feig himself has said publicly that the movie will need to make a minimum of $500 million if it’s to be deemed a success. Let’s be honest, without a release in China (where it’s banned due to its storyline dealing in the paranormal), Ghostbusters is really going to struggle to hit that target, especially with the release of Suicide Squad – which is tracking big – just around the corner.
Sony has yet to make an announcement on a sequel, although their head of distribution has said one is on the cards. With no official word from the studio at this point, we can safely say they’re seriously considering passing. In the past we’ve seen Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles get a sequel announced the day the first film was released, and Star Trek 4 was revealed the week before Star Trek Beyond opened (Fox also did the same thing with X-Men: Apocalypse in 2014). Sony themselves announced dates for The Amazing Spider-Man 3, The Amazing Spider-Man 4, Sinister Six and Venom/Carnage before pulling the plug on their Spider-Verse. You can probably put money on Suicide Squad getting a sequel announcement in the coming weeks, especially when you consider Warner Bros are firing on all cylinders following a very positive and crowd-pleasing display at Comic-Con. Sequels are announced by studios who have faith in their property.
The other side of the coin, however, says that Sony has to make a sequel as the Hollywood studio system currently thrives and survives on franchises alone with original ideas struggling to compete against established titles. Disney have Marvel and Star Wars as well as their animated movies and Pixar. Warner Bros. have DC, Harry Potter and LEGO. Universal have The Fast & The Furious, Jurassic World and Despicable Me. Fox have X-Men, Deadpool, Kung-Fu Panda, Kingsman and Planet of the Apes. Paramount have Star Trek, Transformers, How to Train Your Dragon and a recently revived Shrek.
At present – aside from Hotel Transylvania – Sony don’t have a franchise to put their hat on. Spider-Man is now co-owned and distributed by Disney and Marvel Studios, and James Bond isn’t officially under their control. The Smurfs is currently in a quandary. It was planned to be rebooted last year with Get Smurfy, but the newly titled Smurfs: Lost Village is in some form of Development Hell with a release date that keeps getting pushed back. Last year they had hoped to launch Pixels as a new franchise for them – with plans in place for a sequel that would have seen The Arcaders take on video games from the 1990s – but the movie’s poor performance and dreadful critic response put that on the backburner (although those plans weren’t helped by Adam Sandler’s Happy Madison signing an exclusive deal with Netflix).
Last year, ignoring Spectre for reasons stated above, Sony’s biggest movie was Hotel Transylvania 2. However it’s $473 million worldwide really pales in comparison to Universal’s Minions ($1.1 billion) and Disney’s Zootopia ($1 billion). It will also likely be beaten by Universal’s The Secret Life of Pets – which didn’t have a first film to bump its popularity – as it’s already at $324 million worldwide with several more big territories (including China) still to come. The year previous it was The Amazing Spider-Man 2, which is now co-owned by Disney. In 2013 their biggest movie was Grown Ups 2, which still could get a sequel, but is again held up by Sandler’s Netflix deal.
Sony need a franchise, and they need one that works.
So far in 2016, the biggest title under Sony’s control with franchise potential is The Angry Birds Movie, but that hasn’t had a sequel announced yet either. Next year they have Emojimovie: Express Yourself (but that’s not a guaranteed success) and Jumanji, which will come with some major backlash from fans of Robin Williams who feel the reboot is disrespectful. Both films are unknowns.
Their biggest chance of box office success currently sits with the wild and wacky MIB23 – a crossover of Men in Black and 21 Jump Street – which in theory could be a goldmine. The Jump Street movies have earned a combined £532 million (from a combined production budget of just $90 million) and their formally lucrative Men in Black series earned in excess of $1.6 billion. On paper, a successful reboot of Men in Black coupled with the already proven track record of Jump Street could create dollar signs and another franchise for Sony. But that’s only if the incredibly off-the-wall idea works.
Ghostbusters should have worked. It should have been a sure-fire success. It was an established franchise with one of the most iconic logos and theme songs in the world and a passionate fanbase that could rival the likes of Star Wars and Star Trek. While any reboot announcement would have come with angry backlash (though not at the level an all-female reboot got), it should have made a lot of money. At this rate the 2016 reboot could struggle to meet the unadjusted box office numbers of its 1984 counter-part. It will be lucky if it beats the much more maligned Ghostbusters II. They clearly had a sequel in mind for Feig’s Ghostbusters (going by the post-credit stinger), but a poor return on a rather pricey investment could spell an end for Ghost Corps and the Ghostbusters Universe before they even get started.
The idea of planning franchises and sequels before your first film is off the ground is why some movies struggle to find an audience. One of the issues with the 2016 reboot – of which there are many – is that it only feels like a ‘first film’. It’s a franchise looking for a movie. The original film was never looking for a sequel, it was a stand alone adventure. Dan Aykroyd has said that he had visions of Ghostbusters being the fourth emergency service, but he never laid out a franchise road map. In fact the only reason we got a sequel and a potential third movie was because producers Michael C. Gross and Joe Medjuck took the idea from Aykroyd, Harold Ramis and Ivan Reitman and turned it into a merchandise spewing machine with animated spin-off The Real Ghostbusters. Without that cartoon series, we may never have had the studio-demanded and inferior sequel Ghostbusters II. And, really, Ghostbusters II‘s under performance was the reason a third film took so long to develop (and eventually never get made).
So put yourself in Sony’s shoes. They need a franchise they can build upon with an established name and brand, but you’re currently looking at your best bet on success losing you money. You’ve got Emojimovie, MIB23 and Jumanji in the pipeline, but none are guaranteed to work. Would you risk another $144 million on a sequel to a money-losing film? More to the point, would Feig want to come back after the abuse he’s taken over the last couple of years, or will he just ‘Joss Whedon it’ and leave the filmmaking world for a bit? What about the actors who have been taking online hits to the face just because they’re women or – gasp – African American? Do you think Leslie Jones would want to get the hate she’s been getting over the last year or so just because she wanted to do a comedy movie all over again?
A sequel to Ghostbusters is risky. As risky as carrying an unlicensed nuclear accelerator on your back. And I’m not convinced Sony will pull the trigger.
Luke Owen is the Deputy Editor of Flickering Myth and the co-host of The Flickering Myth Podcast and Scooperhero News. You can follow him on Twitter @ThisisLukeOwen and read his weekly feature The Week in Star Wars.
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