For almost two years now, there’s been talk about Sony doing a Ghostbusters 3, having hired writers and even picked a release date of summer 2011, but things started sounding shaky earlier this year when rumors started surfacing that the studio may no longer want to have Ivan Reitman direct it.
Then in March, Bill Murray, who had long been balking at doing a third movie, appeared on the “Late Show with David Letterman” and claimed that the thought of a third movie is his “nightmare” and is just “crazy talk.” You can watch that clip below if you missed it:
At the press day for Aaron Schneider’s Get Low, ComingSoon.net asked about the statements Murray made on the Letterman show to which we got an equally enigmatic answer:
“You know, it’s really the studio starts this stuff,” he told us. “They start saying ‘Ghostbusters.’ They want to do (it) and it’s really the world of sequels and bringing these things back again, and then some wiseacre said, ‘Hey, we got a couple of new writers who are gunna write something.’ And I thought, ‘Oh, well, maybe there’ll be some writers’ and there was always this joke, sort of a half-true, half-joke thing like, ‘Well, I’ll do it if you kill me off in the first reel.’ That was my joke, you know? So supposedly someone was writing a script where I actually got killed in the first reel and became a ghost, which I thought, ‘Well, that’s kind of clever anyway.’ But then these guys that were supposedly the writers that were going to do it, they wrote a film that came out and people saw the film* and went… ‘We’re not going to do it after all, are we?’ So it’s just a kind of a dreamy thing. They want to create a new generation of Ghostbusters, you know? They’d just like us to pass the torch.” (*Presumably that was Harold Ramis’ last movie Year One.)
When asked to clarify whether making the movie really would be a “nightmare,” Bill Murray told us this: “Well, it’s true, but we made a great movie and then we made another one, you know? So we went to the well twice and it’s almost impossible to do the second movie as well. Only horror movies get better as they go along because they have more money to spend for more crazy effects. I actually thought the other day–it’s just become so irritating–but I actually heard people like, young people that really [heard] of the movie when they were kids and I thought, ‘You know, maybe I should just do it. Maybe it’d be fun to do.’ Because the guys are funny and I miss [Rick] Moranis and Annie [Potts] and Danny. Those people are some people that were really, you know, I miss them. I think that’s really a big part of it.”
So yeah, basically we’re pretty much where we were before, not really knowing if this is a movie that may actually happen or how involved Murray will be, although his last few thoughts certainly makes it seem like the actor may be warming up to reuniting with some of his old cast mates. Hopefully, a decision will be made on this soon before the idea cools off anymore than it has in the past few months.
Look for more with Murray and his co-star Robert Duvall before Get Low opens in select cities on July 30.
