Luke Owen sifts through the rumours…
We’re only a few days away from Paul Feig’s reboot of Ghostbusters arriving in cinemas, and there has certainly been a lot said about it already. From its first trailer confusing the message, to people rejecting the idea of a female Slimer, Ghostbusters is going to have to try really hard to win round the haters. But while certain members of the cast and the film’s director are positive, it might not be all sunshine at Sony.
Since it went into production last year, there have been a lot of rumours about a troubled production on sites like 4Chan and Reddit from those claiming to be either involved or close to the film. I decided to go through each one, and add in my own two cents into what could have happened behind the scenes.
As we do with all our rumours here at Flickering Myth, we advise you take all of this with a pinch of salt. Not all of it is true and a lot of it is coming from anonymous users online. However, there are some stories that can be backed up with hard evidence, and you only have to look at the similarities between these production rumours and last year’s Fantastic Four to see that some of this could be true.
Let’s dive in…
1. Amy Pascal hated Ivan Reitman
When Ivan Reitman was trying to get a version of Ghostbusters III off the ground that everyone at Sony was happy with, then-studio head Amy Pascal wasn’t happy with his direction. Reports say that Reitman was looking to direct a movie that featured new recruits, with Jonah Hill, Zach Galifianakis, Adam Pally, Jessie Eisenberg, Anne Hathaway and Brie Larson as the Ghostbusters along with Sasha Baron Cohen as the villain. Pascal didn’t like the choice of Cohen, and wanted the film to be produced by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg with Rogen starring. She also wrote in an email (leaked from the Sony Email Hack of December 2014) that Reitman was not the right man to direct. It is said that following Harold Ramis’ death, Reitman was forced to take a step back and Pascal took over development.
2. The all-female Ghostbusters was born out of The Amazing Spider-Man 2’s failure
One of the proposed movies in Sony’s shared Spider-Man universe was a ‘female Spider-Man movie’ which was rumoured to be either Spider-Woman, Black Cat or an all-female superhero team called Glass Ceiling. Although The Amazing Spider-Man 2 failed at the box office and killed all of Sony’s plans, Pascal still wanted to do the all-female movie and sent her presentation over to Paul Feig for him to direct. Glass Ceiling sadly was put on the back-burner, but Pascal instead offered him Ghostbusters, which he accepted so long as he could do it his way with no producer involvement.
3. Feig cut Reitman out of the production
In the Sony Hack emails, Feig notes that he has had bad experiences working on films where the producers had an idea of what the movie should be. And so with that, Ivan Reitman was locked out of the Ghostbusters reboot. In an email from Amy Pascal (again from the leaks), she invited Paul Feig to a dinner party at her house with everyone else involved in the reboot, but not Reitman. The email even states that Feig should not mention the dinner party when he met with Reitman the following day as he was the only person not invited. It was at this dinner party that Feig officially signed on to direct the reboot.
4. The budget was cut
After Amy Pascal was fired from her position at Sony and Tom Rothman took over, one of his first orders was to slash the budget of Ghostbusters. So the $169 million Pascal okay’d for Feig to use was cut down to $144 million. Still no small chuck of change, however this could explain why the marketing was kept so close to the film’s release as a cost saving measure. With that said, Rothman cutting budgets is nothing new as he did this repeatedly while he was the studio head at 20th Century Fox on movies such as X-Men Origins: Wolverine.
5. Melissa McCarthy and Feig argued a lot on set
The rumour has it that the cast all signed on because they liked the original movie, and in McCarthy’s case because of her love for the cartoon spin-off The Real Ghostbusters. However this was before they’d read the script by Feig and Katie Dippold, which was reportedly very bad. According to sources close to the production, the poor script led to McCarthy and Feig having several arguments during production. One source noted that McCarthy was upset because she wanted to make “an actual good Ghostbusters in the spirit of the cartoon series” but they’re instead stuck with a “lame duck of a script”.
6. McCarthy also argued with her fellow actors
According to sources, McCarthy’s disapproval of the script also led to her having arguments with an unnamed member of the cast, and time in the day was set aside to ensure both of them had the same number of lines. The report also says that more time was spent on these meetings than actually shooting the movie.
7. Kristin Wiig spent all her time away from the cast
Following all these on-set arguments, Kristin Wiig reportedly spent most of the film away from the set in her trailer (which would suggest she was not the cast member McCarthy was arguing with), apparently lamenting her choice to sign on to “this disaster”. Wiig is also reportedly very upset with how the movie has turned out, and it should be noted that she hasn’t done a lot of press for it either.
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