Credit: Columbia Pictures
Well, death has never stopped the Ghostbusters before, and it doesn’t look like it’ll stop them now.
Despite the death of comedy icon Harold Ramis, who starred as Egon Spengler in the original Ghostbusters movies, Sony is still looking to move forward withGhostbusters 3.
Ramis was intended to appear in the sequel in a brief cameo alongside Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd, who starred together in the 1984 original and its 1989 sequel, to set up a passing of the torch to a trio of newcomers.
Director Ivan Reitman will be meeting with Sony to consider how best to move forward in the wake of Ramis’ death. The script, written by The Office writers Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky, will have to be entirely revamped.
“There will be some repercussions,” says an insider on the long-gestating project.
However, a different source from within the studio claims Ramis’ death has minimal impact on the production, since the actor was poised to have only a very minuscule role.
“He was always great to bounce something off of, and that will certainly be missed,” the source says of Ramis. “But it won’t affect the script.”
Ramis, who co-wrote the first two Ghostbusters films, held a first-dollar gross stake in the third film along with Reitman, Aykroyd and Murray — a position that will now revert to his estate. But no deals have been finalized just yet, and the longer the project remains in development, the more likely it is that the principal stars will have to take break-even cuts to get the film up and running.
Yet even before Ramis’ tragic passing, the script was reportedly nowhere near ready to begin shooting in 2014. In short, no matter how minor a setback studio sources claim Ramis’ death to be, it’s still a setback. Is a third Ghostbusters film even all that great an idea in the first place if it’s just going to be three new guys anyway? I’m not even sure it’s necessary, but then again, a second Ghostbustersmovie wasn’t exactly necessary, and that turned out pretty great. So who knows?
Either way, I’ve still got the originals in my collection to keep me warm in this cold, Egon-less world. So there’s that.
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