An Ambitious Aykroyd On Reassembling the Ghostbusters Brand

Blowing the roof off of Ghostbusters

There's been loads of focus on a third film, but you'd be crazy to think that SONY would reestablish the Ghostbusters franchise for just one more movie installment.

Enter this doozy of an interview with Dan Aykroyd. He wants to nail down the canon mythology of Ghostbusters over a decade of media in a fashion similar to Disney's renewed efforts with Star Wars. It's ambitious, but here's where he goes with it...

Aykroyd: My whole thinking is Ghostbusters now is, its beyond just another sequel, a prequel, another TV show. I'm thinking what does the whole brand mean to Sony? What does Pixar and Star Wars mean to Disney? What does Marvel mean to Fox? And all of us on the team now, the executives, the creatives, Ivan and myself. We're thinking what do we build this thing into in the next 10 years?  

Not just another movie or another TV show, but what's the totality of it? The whole mythology from the beginning of their lives, the end of their lives. Ghostbusters at nine years old, Ghostbusters in High School. 

I draw this analogy. We've got the Ecto, it's sitting in the garage, it's got the motor out of it, the transmission out of it, the paint's gone, the wheels are gone, it's up on blocks, it needs new electronics, new everything. That's what we have to do. The whole vehicle of Ghostbusters has to be rebuilt. That's the ambitious thinking that's going on now.
Taking on the model of Marvel, where we take all of the elements that are in this movie and we put them out there as different ideas. 

I think a third movie with females, or a fourth movie with females, is definitely a possibility. We need to write it.

In a recent interview with Ghostbusters producer Joe Medjuck, he said that "there is no script." Aykroyd's "we need to write it" points to some script work still needing to be done.

Here Aykroyd talks about how there's been three iterations of the third film's script so far, one can assume the Hellbent concept, The Office guys writing a film for Murray to star in and the most recent concept from Men in Black 3's writer. Will any of these ever see the day of light? Will SONY keep the third film's script mostly intact and cover Paul Feig's ideas for a female focused Ghostbusters in another film? The option seems to be on the table.