If you’re getting a bit tired of hearing this song and dance from Columbia Picture and by extension the always-enthusiastic Dan Aykroyd, I feel your pain. However, I must inform you, as it is my duty to carry out film news of all varieties, that screenwriter Etan Cohen is the latest of Hollywood’s dream weavers to attempt the monumental task of updating Ghostbusters, a franchise that is now 28 years old.
Aykroyd has become rather notorious over the past decade for casually dropping vague status updates to whichever loosely defined media personnel is within earshot, that Ghostbusters 3 IS happening. It was no different last week when Aykroyd talked up local news channel WIVB4 of New York while in town to promote his latest non-Hollywood venture Crystal Head Vodka. As always, Aykroyd’s career-defining franchise was brought up and he was more than happy to casually mention new writers had been brought in, yet again, though he wouldn’t say much else.
This week we finally get confirmation that for the first time in a few years, Aykroyd’s guerrilla update was honest and not wishful thinking on the actor’s part. Respected film industry trade magazine Variety is reporting Etan Cohen, famous for brilliantly subversive satire like Tropic Thunder amidst less celebrated fare such as this summer’s mostly derided Men In Black 3, has officially been hired to pen the latest draft of the proposed third Ghostbusters film.
Way back in 2008, The Office writers Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky were hired to write a new script, amidst reports that GB3 would be a franchise re-boot starring the who’s who of comedic fresh blood such as Seth Rogen and Anna Faris as young upstart Ghostbusters, taking the reigns from the aging soon-to-retire founding members Peter Venkman (Billy Murray), Ray Stantz (Aykroyd), Egon Spengler (Harold Ramis) and Winston Zeddemore (Ernie Hudson).
There’s no word on what kind of story the latest version of part 3 would tackle, but Murray has famously been anti-threequel over the years, sometimes jokingly saying he’d agree to appear only if Venkman was a ghost, haunting the surviving team members. Otherwise reports have surfaced of him throwing drafts of the GB3 script directly into the trash without opening them every time Aykroyd or someone else manages to get one to him.
Only time will tell if this latest pointless attempt to re-capture magic in a bottle some quarter century later will pan out, pent up demand from fans or lack thereof be damned.
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