Paul Feig's all-female Ghostbusters reboot is happening. While this has drawn a fair amount of defense and fire, it's time to put both aside and look at the issue that truly matters: what's it going to be about? Some have held out hope that, at the very least, this would be a continuation of the previously established universe. However, it has now been set in stone by Paul Feig himself that this is the start of a new Ghostbusters franchise.
In a recent sit down with AlloCine, Feig elaborated on the fact that the new, all-female Ghostbusters team wasn't assembled to remake or continue any sort of threads the original films may have laid down, but instead it's meant to be a fresh start for the paranormal investigation world. How fresh of a start is what Paul Feig revealed to a journalist for the French film site, as he stated:
I thought I'd rather do it as a reboot, so I wasn't tied to the old movies. The old movies are so good, I didn't want to mess with them. I also want to see the beginnings of this group. I want to see people seeing ghosts for the first time, and how they are going to fight them for the first time, how they develop their technology.
Feig had also mentioned in his interview that he was offered the job on Ghostbusters 3 "several times," but turned it down because he didn't know how to make an old school Ghostbusters movie. To be fair, if Paul Feig wasn't all that interested in an original recipe Ghostbusters sequel, it's probably best that the entire project was revamped from the ground up. The studio really wanted Feig because his comedy chops are apparently in high demand, and to saddle him with the second sequel to the original franchise would have been awkward if his heart wasn't completely in it. Feig himself even admits that working with funny women is not only what excites him about his projects, it's what he does best.
For all of the heat he has taken for accepting and reshaping this project into its current form, Paul Feig, at the end of the day, is like the rest of us Ghostbusters fans,. He loves and respects the older films to a degree that makes following in their footsteps a bit daunting. A brand new Ghostbusters universe, christened by Feig's directiorial efforts, is a fresh start and a way to avoid screwing with our memories of the original films too much. Revisiting Ray, Egon, Peter, and Winston is as simple as popping in your Blu-ray copy of Ghostbusters and quoting your favorite lines. But for those of us open enough to a new take on a similar story, this is probably the best news we've heard since the project was announced. If you're interested, you can watch the full interview with Feig in the video below.
Ghostbusters hits theaters on July 22, 2016. Before that, Paul Feig has Spy, which sneaks its way into theaters on June 5.
