TORONTO — Canadian actor Dan Aykroyd said this week he believes Ghostbusters should be the next big movie franchise.
“It’s beyond just another sequel, a prequel, another TV show,” he said in London, according to The Hollywood Reporter. “I’m thinking, what does the whole brand mean to Sony? What does Pixar and Star Wars mean to Disney? What does Marvel?”
Aykroyd, 62, said new movies could explore “the whole mythology from the beginning of their lives, the end of their lives. Ghostbusters at nine years old, Ghostbusters in high school.
“That’s the ambitious thinking that’s going on now,” he added. “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.”
In July, Aykroyd said plans for a third Ghostbusters movie are stalled over financing.
The actor, who played Dr. Raymond Stantz in the 1984 original and 1989 sequel (he also co-wrote both movies), said Sony Pictures had not decided “whether they want to drop $150 million on a Ghostbusters 3 right now.”
“We hope that things get sorted out at the corporate level, all the way up and down the company, so that capital can be freed up for the artists to do their job,” Aykroyd said on Global’s The Morning Show.
Aykroyd’s Ghostbusters co-star Harold Ramis died in February and original cast member Bill Murray has said he will not be involved.
“Ghostbusters almost created a whole new genre of large-scale filmmaking that is also funny,” the film’s Canadian director Ivan Reitman told The Canadian Press recently. “It was a very organically made film. It’s not just that we improvised stuff while we were shooting it.
“It was this sort of unique group of actors that I was very fortunate to gather together to make the film.”
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