Paul Feig turned down Ghostbusters 3 in favour of reboot

Paul Feig is now fully immersed in rebooting the Ghostbusters franchise for Sony, but has revealed to AlloCine that he turned down the studio’s overtures several times back when the plan was to make a direct sequel to the first two films…

“I had been contacted several times about doing a sequel for Ghostbusters and I just kept turning it down because I didn’t know how to do it,” explains Feig. “The scripts had been written, but I couldn’t figure out how to do it. I wasn’t excited about it.”

“So finally, one day I was like, it’s a great franchise and it’s a great idea, if I was going to do it, how would I do it? And then I thought, if I could put four women in the lead roles, that’s exciting to me. That I know how to do, and I know how to make that funny. And there’s so many funny women I’ve been dying to work with. Obviously Melissa and Kristen are in it, but then Kate McKinnon and Leslie Jones, who are so funny. It just seemed like the way to do it.”

“Then I thought, I’d rather do it as a reboot so I’m not tied to the old movies. The old movies are so good, I didn’t want to mess with them. And I also want to see the beginnings of this group. I want to see people seeing ghosts for the first time, and how they’re going to fight them for the first time, how they develop their technology. So it just got very exciting to me. I just like working with funny women, and that’s all I really like to do with my career.”

All of which frankly sounds fantastic, and a far better option than trying to resurrect a group of characters whose last outing was some 20 years ago. We’ll see how it turns out when the film opens in the US on 22 July 2016. A UK date has yet to be confirmed.

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George was once GamesRadar's resident movie news person, based out of London. He understands that all men must die, but he'd rather not think about it. But now he's working at Stylist Magazine.