GHOSTBUSTERS: FROZEN EMPIRE Director on How THE REAL GHOSTBUSTERS Inspired the Film

Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire was a fun movie, but it was also kind of a mess. Regardless of its 45% Rotten Tomatoes critics score, I think the movie is still going to be a hit with audiences and will have a decent box office run.

The movie very much felt like a live-action cartoon, and that’s not surprising considering it was heavily inspired by the classic 1986 cartoon series The Real Ghostbusters. Co-writer and director Gil Kenan confirmed that he and producer Jason Reitman watched the series before working on the film and there are ways that it inspired the tone of the film. Kenan said:

"We both do love Viggo [from Ghostbusters II], but we felt like because Gozer made their return in Afterlife, the onus on us was to lead boldly into the unknown with creating our villain and go off the map to discover their mythology and their story. We did watch a lot of episodes of Real Ghostbusters as a cleansing and as a heart-opening process before we started writing, because that show is, first, so good and super fun and it is also wild with its boundary-breaking, in terms of pulling from mythologies and stories you may have heard of and giving corners of the city supernatural attention in a way that films just don't have the screen time to do. So watching those shows, actually, was really inspiring, not in a literal way, but in a broader, thematic storytelling and spiritual way."

These comments echo past remarks that Kenan shared saying that the film’s villains drew inspiration from the cartoon series with its "wild, original and weird-as-f**k villains." He added: "We wanted to bring that show's looseness and fearlessness to this movie. I think it's going to surprise people just how big this film is."

The Real Ghostbusters is a great show, and I loved that they were heavily inspired by it while making the film. But, the film could’ve been so much better with a little bit more work on the script and story development.

In the story, New York City finds itself freezing over due to an ancient artifact that unleashes an evil force! Also, the original. In the movie, “the Spengler family returns to where it all started – the iconic New York City firehouse – to team up with the original Ghostbusters, who’ve developed a top-secret research lab to take busting ghosts to the next level. But when the discovery of an ancient artifact unleashes an evil force, Ghostbusters new and old must join forces to protect their home and save the world from a second Ice Age.”

The film is in theaters now.

Via: CB