embee
Lawyer by day. Rules lawyer by night.
Thank you for literally articulating Ivan Reitman's own reason for Ghostbusters (2016);
REITMAN: Well, I’d like to go forward and make new things. I think Ghostbusters probably should be remade, if we can get it all right. We’re working on it, so we’ll see.
Source: Ivan Reitman and Lauren Shuler Donner DAVE Blu-ray Interview
Let's also be honest that a lot of franchises are one good movie and then a series of terrible movies.
The Jurassic Park franchise is one of the poster children of this. Jaws is another. I think we would all do well to not mythologize the greatness of "franchises" when, in reality, taken as a whole, they are all too often mediocre with focused areas of greatness.
Star Wars - I'm looking at you:
Ep1 - a terrible movie,
Ep2 - a even more terrible movie,
Ep3 - a terrible movie that had a decent part,
Solo - a waste of a movie that didn't know what it wanted to do
Rogue One - a decent movie that depends on intertextuality,
Star Wars - a hokey movie that shouldn't work but somehow managed to be a masterpiece
ESB - a very good movie that is the middle part of an overarching story
ROTJ - a solid movie that tied up a lot of loose ends but raised its own issues
Ep 7 - a forgettable reboot of SW that had a couple of bright spots
Ep8 - a deeply schizophrenic movie that had some very good spots, some dismal spots, and a lot of forgettable mediocrity
Ep 9 - a movie without its own internal reason to exist
Alien(s) is yet another, with a steady decline in quality with each additional movie. Many of the Disney Renaissance animated movies went down this route, as did all of the monster movies, kaiju movies, and much of JJ Abrams' filmography (see above).
When one allows their enjoyment of one movie to shade their feelings of subsequent movies that depend on that movie, it lionizes and villifies movies that don't deserve that treatment.
Ghostbusters (1984) is a legendary film that is rightly regarded as one of the greatest movie comedies. Ghostbusters (2016) suffered from a variety of factors. The original drivers of Ghostbusters (1984) were among those factors. Reitman had been a driver of rebooting the original. Murray didn't want anything to do with it for much of the time. Ackroyd had been more than willing to keep mining the IP. Feig came into it when Reitman decided to leave. His writing partner had already written a previous script and had a good working history with McCarthy, who herself had a long good working history with the other female leads, all of whom are some of the finest comic actors around.
Ghostbusters (2106) has some fantastic moments. Kevin's interview is one of them. McKinnon's performance was similarly fantastic. And I am genuinely of the opinion that the movie is no worse than Ghostbusters 2. So to say that it's somehow not worthy of the Ghostbusters brand name is a bit disingenuous.
As to Afterlife, as stated, it's a nice looking trailer. I'm curious as to why it's Reitman's kid directing the movie and not Ivan Reitman himself.
