Ghostbusters: Afterlife Saved The Franchise, Says Sony Boss
Sony boss Tom Rothman has said that Jason Reitman’s Ghostbusters: Afterlife played a major part in saving the franchise. Unlike Paul Feig's polarizing 2016 all-female Ghostbusters reboot, Sony took the tried-and-tested Star Wars route and made Ghostbusters: Afterlife a legacy sequel. Directed and co-written by Reitman, son of original Ghostbusters director the late Ivan Reitman, the movie focuses on Egon Spengler (Harold Ramis)’s estranged family as they inherit his decrepit Oklahoma farmhouse after his death.
Though their mother Callie (Carrie Coon) disapproves, Spengler’s grandchildren Phoebe (Mckenna Grace) and Trevor (Finn Wolfhard) soon discover their ghost-busting heritage thanks to Phoebe’s summer school science teacher, Gary Grooberson (Paul Rudd). Together, they must team up with some of Summerville’s other residents (and, eventually, the remaining original Ghostbusters) in order to save the world from Gozer the Gozerian. Ghostbusters: Afterlife may have been one of the blockbusters hit hardest by COVID-19 after it was delayed no less than four times, but was generally positively received when it finally premiered.
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Now, Rothman has stated that Afterlife saved the Ghosbusters franchise after two poorly received sequels to the 1984 original. In an interview with Deadline, the Sony chairman and CEO stated that when he first took over Sony in 2015, the studio's reputation was that it had no intellectual property (IP) to make movies with. However, Rothman argued it actually had “fantastic” IP, including Ghostbusters. The Sony boss then implied that though the 2016 reboot “didn’t work out that well,” because of Ivan and Jason Reitman, Afterlife was
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