It’s the question that never seems to have an answer – will there ever be a Ghostbusters III?
With a pre-production that has been off and on more times than Ross and Rachel, we’ve now got some new information about Ghostbusters III, some of which seems to go against what Dan Aykroyd was saying back in May.
At a Toronto International Film Festival screening of the original Ghostbusters from 1984, director Ivan Reitman had this to say about the project and Bill Murray’s involvement:
“Bill Murray has never actually read anything,” the director claims. “He may have read ten pages at some point, but he’s never read a script, but he’s never been interested either, that part is true… it wasn’t Ghostbusters in particular, it’s just, he’s been carrying on his life in a different way, in terms of the kind of parts that he’s wanted to pursue.”
“I would love to work with him again and I hope that he could be in this film” he continues. “He might be, he might not be, I really don’t know.”
On whether or not the movie should be made at all, Reitman said, “if we can find a way to make a film that’s somewhat as magical as [Ghostbusters] finally turned out to be, then it’s worth making. If we can’t, we probably won’t do it. We’ve had a couple of scripts that are quite good… that we just didn’t think quite had it… and one of them was particularly centric to Bill and we just couldn’t get him to read it. That one didn’t get made even though it was pretty damn good.”
“We’ve been thinking of alternatives and we’re actually making some real progress and we’ll see what happens. That’s the most honest answer I can give you.”
So, over 20 years since it was first on the table, our hands are still up in the air on whether Ghostbusters III will ever see the light of day. While Aykroyd is telling Larry King he’ll have a cameo, Reitman is claiming that they don’t even have a complete script to work on. It’s quite the puzzle…
Originally published July 22, 2013. Updated April 11, 2018.
