Although the poor box office performance of Ghostbusters: Answer the Call seems to have put the brakes on a sequel to the all-female relaunch, co-creator Ivan Reitman believes there’s plenty of life left in the Ghostbusters franchise, as he revealed during a recent interview with io9.
“We certainly would’ve loved to have a larger hit,” said Reitman, director of the original two movies, and producer on the reboot. “But considering the last film was almost 30 years ago, it really did extremely well. I think the film cost too much, frankly, and that’s the real issue. I personally had other points of view in terms of where the film should go and it was kind of a continuous conversation with Paul Feig about that. But Paul was the filmmaker on this one and he’s a very talented director. I wanted to give him enough room to do the film he thought it should be.”
“I think Ghostbusters is this wonderful [intellectual property] because it has so many storytelling opportunities,” Reitman continued. “We jumped into an animated film [after the last movie] and we are developing live-action films. I want to bring all these stories together as a universe that makes sense within itself. Part of my job right now is to do that.”
Reitman went on to state that he hopes the animated feature will be ready for release in 2019 or 2020, but added that “It depends on how fast we can get it all together. It’s hard to make an animated film.”
In addition to the animated feature, Sony and Reitman’s Ghost Corps are also producing a new animated TV series entitled Ghostbusters: Ecto Force, which is expected to debut in 2018 and follows “a new generation of Ghostbusters in the year 2050 who capture ghosts around the world with help from local teams—and some very cool gear.”
