When it comes to legendary titles such as Ghostbusters, the rumour-mill immediately kicks into high gear. Speculation seems to have swirled around the status of Sony’s plans to expand the franchise almost as long as there has been a franchise to expand – but so far all that has been confirmed is Paul Feig’s female-led reboot, which is now shooting in Boston. Leave it to radio host Howard Stern though to grab the bull by the horns, cut to the chase, and get the facts straight from the horse’s mouth, as he questioned Channing Tatum about the project during an interview on his show.
Tatum has for some time been associated with a second Ghostbusters project being developed by the studio. As Feig and his team move ahead with their film, Ivan Reitman, Dan Aykroyd, Drew Pearce and Joe and Anthony Russo have been collaborating to an unknown extent with Tatum and his partners – Reid Carolin and Peter Kiernan. So, with Tatum in his studio, Stern had to ask, is he rebooting Ghostbusters?
“That thing’s gotten messy, I gotta be honest. There’s a lot of people doing a lot of things on Ghostbusters… Yeah. I don’t know, is the answer. I would love to do it. There’s a lot of people in the Ghostbusters pool right now… I think we’re in sort of a gestation period.
That’s a beloved movie [for] a lot of people, and then there’s a lot of people that don’t know – that never saw the movies. My little cousins have never seen the Ghostbusters movies. But you have half and half. It’s like, as soon as they hear it’s happening, half the people go, ‘…No! You cannot make that movie!’ and the other half goes, ‘Oh yeah, I would love to see that.’ But we’re nowhere near going [forward].”
Ignoring, for a moment, the idea that there could be people in the world that have never seen Ghostbusters, this update from Tatum gives something of a glimpse into the concept of movie ‘rooms’ that seems to be blossoming in Hollywood studios right now. We’ve heard talk of the Transformers writing room, and the Star Wars writing room – an idea that has sprung from the advent of the mega-franchise. Just as episodic television has writer’s rooms, now so does episodic filmmaking – although in the case of Ghostbusters, with Reitman, Ackroyd, Tatum, Pearce, Carolin, Kiernan and the Russo Brothers, it is almost certainly more of a metaphorical ‘room’.
With Feig’s Ghostbusters movie already out of the gate, however, it is interesting to hear how the rest of the Sony ‘Ghostbusters room’ is apparently in disarray. Unusually for Hollywood, it seems that when it comes to rebooting Ghostbusters, it is very much a case of ‘ladies first’.