By his own admission, Jason Reitman never thought he’d be the guy calling action on big-budget studio blockbusters, having spent his entire career dodging questions about when he was going to follow in his father’s footsteps before finally signing on to direct Ghostbusters: Afterlife.
The filmmaker has four Academy Award nominations to his name for writing, directing and producing, so the independent scene was clearly working out very well for him, but the lure of the supernatural comedy franchise ultimately proved far too irresistible in the end.
However, it turns out that he’s done his fair share of uncredited rewrites in the past, after Reitman revealed in an interview with Insider that he’d polished the scripts for Michael Bay’s Transformers: Dark of the Moon and Age of Extinction.
“It’s very easy to look at a director and their work and think this is the sum total of that human being. The truth is I love horror films. I love big box office movies. To play in that Transformers world was like, I used to play with Transformers, now I get to play in Transformers.”
A big name punching up screenplays and not taking credit is hardly a new phenomenon; Carrie Fisher was one of the most highly-regarded script doctors in the business, while Quentin Tarantino got his fingerprints all over the intense verbal exchanges of Tony Scott’s Crimson Tide and Bay’s The Rock, to name but two notable examples.
No offense to Reitman, though, but his contributions were hardly noticed when the Transformers dialogue was still awful, but at least Ghostbusters: Afterlife has him in the blockbuster business for real.
