Discuss Ghostbusters: Afterlife, released on November 19, 2021 and directed by Jason Reitman.
#4935125
RichardLess wrote: May 20th, 2020, 5:34 pm That’s a lot of conjecture on your part. Could it have happened that way? Sure. Maybe. I guess. Anything is possible. I think what’s more likely is GB3 went just the way all the other GB movies did before it. (minus the actual getting made part lol)

“Offering Harold the chance to direct it himself”. Each GB film has started off with Dan doing his own thing, bringing it to Harold/Ivan and then it transforming. This was no different. GB3 was written on spec. That’s why he classifies it as a Hobby. The idea that Harold Ramis, probably one of the greatest comedy writers of all time, would write something like GB3 on spec, tells you everything you need to know. He wasn’t getting paid for this. It was out of a love and passion for the project. I think Harold being interested in directing it was purely out of Ivan not being interested. I mean...Dan offering him the directors chair could be what happened, sure. But was the chair dans to offer? It was probably “how do we get this made without Ivan? Only 1 of us is a talented director”.

I do love that Harold & Dan were working on GB3 together, with no commitment from the studio. No guarantees. Just doing it for the love of doing it. Most established writers who’ve had hits like Harold & Dan don’t write on spec. The ones that do? It tells you something. Writers, established ones, pitch to a studio with maybe an outline, have the studio buy the outline, and then get to work. Or they are under a development deal. Or they’ve been hired for the project. Writing a *sequel* on Spec, is rarer still. I love Dan & Harold keeping the flame alive. Tells you what kind of people they are.
Well, first of all, I shouldn't have said "offered." I meant it in a broad sense. A more accurate way to put what I meant was, the idea of Harold directing it came up as a possibility in conversation between himself, Aykroyd, and Reitman, and Harold considered it a hypothetically interesting challenge and expressed interest in doing it.

I went and looked up some Ramis interviews, and here's some quotes I found:

From an outlet called Film Monthly (http://www.filmmonthly.com/Profiles/Art ... rvest.html):

Gary: I'll get it out of the way. What's with the Ghostbusters 3 rumors?

Harold: You know it came out of interviews for The Ice Harvest. People have been asking for years, "will there be a Ghostbusters 3?" And I went into some detail, saying Danny had written a script and it had some promising concepts. He and I worked on revising it. I was going to direct it. This was years ago. He and I had young Ghostbusters in mind. We were going to return as the bosses.

At AICN (http://legacy.aintitcool.com/node/21858):

Quint: I know you're probably sick of it, but the AICN readers would kill me if I didn't bring up Ghostbusters 3. I know a few years ago it was getting hot and then just seemed to disappear. What's going on with it?

Harold: Yeah, Danny and I actually played around for a while... Aykroyd had a great concept. He called me and said, "I got it. I got Ghostbusters 3." I said, "What is it?" He said, "Ghostbusters go to Hell! This is it!" (laughs)

Quint: So is there a chance that it'll still happen?

Harold: Well, the script was viable. Dan is the most imaginative person. He went off on a tangent. 90% of the movie is a special effect set entirely in Hell, you know. I had a whole different take on it. Really, it was the business that stopped it. I never thought that the public wanted to see the three of us kind of stuffed into our jumpsuits again. I thought we would introduce three new Ghostbusters, but maybe we'd be around as Senior Ghostbusters, running the company or something, but the real adventure would be...and this was so long ago, we were thinking Chris Rock, Chris Farley and Ben Stiller taking over. That would have worked.

And we had the script all worked out. Danny and I had the story and Murray got really... Murray's so cantankerous, you know. Dan called him and said, "Would you be in the movie?" And he said, "I'll be in the movie... but only as a ghost."

Quint: That would have been awesome!

Harold: (laughs) It would have been interesting. So, we even created a story around that. In the end, it sounds greedy, but the deal couldn't be made. We as an entity... Me... well, I'm low man on that totem pole deal-wise, but Ivan, Bill, Danny and me couldn't make a deal with the studio. There wasn't enough left for the studio.

And I can't say my heart was really in it, you know...making the third one.

Finally, over at MovieWeb (https://movieweb.com/exclusive-laughing ... old-ramis/):

MovieWeb: Is there ever any talk or possibility of you and Bill Murray working together again in the future? Might we ever see Ghostbusters 3?

Harold: I think it’s very doubtful. Dan Aykroyd and I tried to get that off the ground once. Dan had a real good idea, I thought it was very funny. He had more energy for it than I did, so he did most of the writing but I said I would direct it if we ever got it going.
Alphagaia wrote: May 21st, 2020, 3:38 pm Not even counting the digital sales and the rest of the world. Just North America.

Sony never lost money on ATc. They did want to make bank on just the BO alone, though
Look, everyone knows I'm a Ghostbusters (2016) defender, but Sony definitely, unquestionably lost millions of dollars on that movie. The entire reason studios want to make money before video is because video pretty much has no hope of saving an expensive flop. The movie has, almost certainly, not made more than $200m more on video (existing sales data caps out at around $120m), and video of course has its own promotional and production costs, so, yeah, video did not close the gap enough for the movie to have been profitable.

(Now, Sony might've come out ahead overall in terms of moving merch that is tied to the brand, but that is not necessarily the same thing, and I definitely think it's fudging to consider that part of the reboot's financial success.)
deadderek, Wafflerobot liked this
#4935126
Before I can get into details. What do you mean with the 200 M? ATC is reported to have lost 70 M in BO, not 200.

I can understand if you don't want to count merchandise, but I made sure to count merchandise royalties especially tied to the ATC brand, not the regular brand.

I feel it's very fair to count all the profits a movie generates, as the royalties are tied to the ATC name, but I feel DVD sales, Blue Ray sales, VOD and Netflix royalties already bring in a chunk of cash to fill the 70 M void. 35+ million just in N-America ( not accounting production costs to make them and marketing, ofcourse), but we can easily double that amount if you bring in the rest of the world.

Not sure how much if that 70+ M is profit, but production is cheap and even half is already a big chunk of profit. And that's just one piece of the pie.

If you mean they made 200M on videosales, I'd love to know where you got that number if you could share!) as if half of that would be profits that already covers the BO loss.
Last edited by Alphagaia on May 23rd, 2020, 2:53 am, edited 1 time in total.
#4935127
droidguy1119 wrote: May 23rd, 2020, 12:32 am
RichardLess wrote: May 20th, 2020, 5:34 pm That’s a lot of conjecture on your part. Could it have happened that way? Sure. Maybe. I guess. Anything is possible. I think what’s more likely is GB3 went just the way all the other GB movies did before it. (minus the actual getting made part lol)

“Offering Harold the chance to direct it himself”. Each GB film has started off with Dan doing his own thing, bringing it to Harold/Ivan and then it transforming. This was no different. GB3 was written on spec. That’s why he classifies it as a Hobby. The idea that Harold Ramis, probably one of the greatest comedy writers of all time, would write something like GB3 on spec, tells you everything you need to know. He wasn’t getting paid for this. It was out of a love and passion for the project. I think Harold being interested in directing it was purely out of Ivan not being interested. I mean...Dan offering him the directors chair could be what happened, sure. But was the chair dans to offer? It was probably “how do we get this made without Ivan? Only 1 of us is a talented director”.

I do love that Harold & Dan were working on GB3 together, with no commitment from the studio. No guarantees. Just doing it for the love of doing it. Most established writers who’ve had hits like Harold & Dan don’t write on spec. The ones that do? It tells you something. Writers, established ones, pitch to a studio with maybe an outline, have the studio buy the outline, and then get to work. Or they are under a development deal. Or they’ve been hired for the project. Writing a *sequel* on Spec, is rarer still. I love Dan & Harold keeping the flame alive. Tells you what kind of people they are.
Well, first of all, I shouldn't have said "offered." I meant it in a broad sense. A more accurate way to put what I meant was, the idea of Harold directing it came up as a possibility in conversation between himself, Aykroyd, and Reitman, and Harold considered it a hypothetically interesting challenge and expressed interest in doing it.

I went and looked up some Ramis interviews, and here's some quotes I found:

From an outlet called Film Monthly (http://www.filmmonthly.com/Profiles/Art ... rvest.html):

Gary: I'll get it out of the way. What's with the Ghostbusters 3 rumors?

Harold: You know it came out of interviews for The Ice Harvest. People have been asking for years, "will there be a Ghostbusters 3?" And I went into some detail, saying Danny had written a script and it had some promising concepts. He and I worked on revising it. I was going to direct it. This was years ago. He and I had young Ghostbusters in mind. We were going to return as the bosses.

At AICN (http://legacy.aintitcool.com/node/21858):

Quint: I know you're probably sick of it, but the AICN readers would kill me if I didn't bring up Ghostbusters 3. I know a few years ago it was getting hot and then just seemed to disappear. What's going on with it?

Harold: Yeah, Danny and I actually played around for a while... Aykroyd had a great concept. He called me and said, "I got it. I got Ghostbusters 3." I said, "What is it?" He said, "Ghostbusters go to Hell! This is it!" (laughs)

Quint: So is there a chance that it'll still happen?

Harold: Well, the script was viable. Dan is the most imaginative person. He went off on a tangent. 90% of the movie is a special effect set entirely in Hell, you know. I had a whole different take on it. Really, it was the business that stopped it. I never thought that the public wanted to see the three of us kind of stuffed into our jumpsuits again. I thought we would introduce three new Ghostbusters, but maybe we'd be around as Senior Ghostbusters, running the company or something, but the real adventure would be...and this was so long ago, we were thinking Chris Rock, Chris Farley and Ben Stiller taking over. That would have worked.

And we had the script all worked out. Danny and I had the story and Murray got really... Murray's so cantankerous, you know. Dan called him and said, "Would you be in the movie?" And he said, "I'll be in the movie... but only as a ghost."

Quint: That would have been awesome!

Harold: (laughs) It would have been interesting. So, we even created a story around that. In the end, it sounds greedy, but the deal couldn't be made. We as an entity... Me... well, I'm low man on that totem pole deal-wise, but Ivan, Bill, Danny and me couldn't make a deal with the studio. There wasn't enough left for the studio.

And I can't say my heart was really in it, you know...making the third one.

Finally, over at MovieWeb (https://movieweb.com/exclusive-laughing ... old-ramis/):

MovieWeb: Is there ever any talk or possibility of you and Bill Murray working together again in the future? Might we ever see Ghostbusters 3?

Harold: I think it’s very doubtful. Dan Aykroyd and I tried to get that off the ground once. Dan had a real good idea, I thought it was very funny. He had more energy for it than I did, so he did most of the writing but I said I would direct it if we ever got it going.
Alphagaia wrote: May 21st, 2020, 3:38 pm Not even counting the digital sales and the rest of the world. Just North America.

Sony never lost money on ATc. They did want to make bank on just the BO alone, though
Look, everyone knows I'm a Ghostbusters (2016) defender, but Sony definitely, unquestionably lost millions of dollars on that movie. The entire reason studios want to make money before video is because video pretty much has no hope of saving an expensive flop. The movie has, almost certainly, not made more than $200m more on video (existing sales data caps out at around $120m), and video of course has its own promotional and production costs, so, yeah, video did not close the gap enough for the movie to have been profitable.

(Now, Sony might've come out ahead overall in terms of moving merch that is tied to the brand, but that is not necessarily the same thing, and I definitely think it's fudging to consider that part of the reboot's financial success.)

That only thing that surprises me in those quotes is hearing Harold say his heart wasn’t into it. You have to wonder if the deterioration of the Murray/Ramis relationship had something to do with it. Knowing that Bill wouldn’t be a big part of it and it wouldn’t be like it was.

Also, is Harold saying here, when he said he had a “different take” on GB3, that the idea for the new GBs was his? So I wonder if Dan’s original thing was “it’s just the usual group of GBs, the 4 of us” and Harold thought it would work better with a younger cast.

I still think the GB3 Hellbent *idea* is solid. It’s New York, It’s not Gozer again...the only problem is that the idea might be too big, ya know? But it sounds fantastic to me. But that goes against my usual notion of that my favourite parts of Ghostbusters isn’t the busting ghosts big action stuff. It’s the character stuff. Watching the guys sit and eat at a table, Harold & Dan hanging out in the fire house investigating—talking about what they are going to have for dinner, Rays Occult Book Shop, Shopping for real estate & talking mortgages. That’s the good stuff. So long as Hellbent had plenty of those moments I’m good.

Also...Chris Farley as a Ghostbuster just never sounded right to me. Farley is a loud obnoxious kind of comedy guy. Subtle is not his style.

I always thought Robert Downey Jr, Helen Hunt, Dave Chappele & Norm Macdonald would’ve been my ideal 1990s early 2000s cast. Maybe slot David Duchovney in there or Jon Stewart. I can just see that cast being magic together.
deadderek liked this
#4935129
I’m never sure why there needs to be a behind the scenes falling out for the principals to have become tired of the franchise. It’s small fry in comparison, but I have old bands that (very!) small groups of fans would love to see reform, but we just got bored of those songs. No fall out, no skullduggery, just sometimes a creative thing means less to the people in it than it does to those that love it. It’s entirely reasonable that any of them would be bored of ghostbusters without it necessarily being about the Ramis/Murray rift.
Alphagaia, Coover5, tylergfoster and 1 others liked this
#4935134
Alphagaia wrote: May 23rd, 2020, 2:01 am Before I can get into details. What do you mean with the 200 M? ATC is reported to have lost 70 M in BO, not 200.

I can understand if you don't want to count merchandise, but I made sure to count merchandise royalties especially tied to the ATC brand, not the regular brand.

I feel it's very fair to count all the profits a movie generates, as the royalties are tied to the ATC name, but I feel DVD sales, Blue Ray sales, VOD and Netflix royalties already bring in a chunk of cash to fill the 70 M void. 35+ million just in N-America ( not accounting production costs to make them and marketing, ofcourse), but we can easily double that amount if you bring in the rest of the world.

Not sure how much if that 70+ M is profit, but production is cheap and even half is already a big chunk of profit. And that's just one piece of the pie.

If you mean they made 200M on videosales, I'd love to know where you got that number if you could share!) as if half of that would be profits that already covers the BO loss.
When Paul Feig said the movie needed to make $500m in theaters for the studio to consider it a success, that's not really an exaggeration. Ghostbusters (2016) cost $144m (maybe $148m, if the $3-4m reshoots that Dan incorrectly exaggerated to $30-40m weren't accounted for in that number). Then, as is the standard for these kinds of movies, the studio goes and spends the same amount of money again on marketing, bringing the cost up to $288m-$296m. On top of that, you must factor in whichever actors or crew had gross participation in the movie, and take out the theater cut. The rule of thumb used to be that a movie had to make 2x its production budget to be in the black, but nowadays it's more like 3x. So we can't say for sure that Ghostbusters (2016) actually starts making any money until it has $432m-$444m.

When I talk merch, I do think, say, Ghostbusters (2016) toys and things count in terms of the movie making money, but I was drawing a line between those items and merch that simply furthers the brand generally. The reboot resulted in those action figures of the original team with the 3D logo you could assemble if you bought all four being put into Toys 'R' Uses. DVDs and Blu-rays of the original two movies were restocked everywhere, with a free iron-on patch in the plastic wrap at Walmart. There were Ghostbusters school supplies with the logo, like the tin carrying case that came with the little card offering VUDU copies of some "Real Ghostbusters" episodes. That stuff doesn't count, in my book, because Sony could've sold that stuff at any time. Also, I feel like the IDW comics are sort of their own thing, so I would not attribute success of those comics back to the box office of the movie, especially since the comic counterparts are still going.

In any case, we don't know how much money 2016-specific merch cost, nor how much it made. I still see 2016 Funko Pops in bargain bins in stores, so I have to guess the merch went over about as well as the movie, which is to say, significantly less successful than the studio hoped.

That leaves the home video stats. Home video stats are not really reported on like theatrical box office and numbers are often scarce. Looking up the one site that reports on this information, I see I had my numbers wrong: the reboot made significantly less money that I said in my previous post. Financial data on this site only goes through the first week of 2017, but between US DVD and Blu-ray sales, the movie made only $38.8m more on video.

https://www.the-numbers.com/movie/Ghost ... ab=summary

So, box office plus video through the first week of 2017 (after which it would continue to dwindle) only gets us to a paltry $267.8m, which is still $164.2m short of the lowest end of the benchmark of the movie's success. We have no data on the merch but it's not covering all of that, bringing us close to the $70m number that Sony is pegged to have lost on the movie (which in this case is probably a low estimate of how much they lost).
RichardLess wrote: May 23rd, 2020, 2:52 am That only thing that surprises me in those quotes is hearing Harold say his heart wasn’t into it. You have to wonder if the deterioration of the Murray/Ramis relationship had something to do with it. Knowing that Bill wouldn’t be a big part of it and it wouldn’t be like it was.

Also, is Harold saying here, when he said he had a “different take” on GB3, that the idea for the new GBs was his? So I wonder if Dan’s original thing was “it’s just the usual group of GBs, the 4 of us” and Harold thought it would work better with a younger cast.

I still think the GB3 Hellbent *idea* is solid. It’s New York, It’s not Gozer again...the only problem is that the idea might be too big, ya know? But it sounds fantastic to me. But that goes against my usual notion of that my favourite parts of Ghostbusters isn’t the busting ghosts big action stuff. It’s the character stuff. Watching the guys sit and eat at a table, Harold & Dan hanging out in the fire house investigating—talking about what they are going to have for dinner, Rays Occult Book Shop, Shopping for real estate & talking mortgages. That’s the good stuff. So long as Hellbent had plenty of those moments I’m good.
Like robbritton is kind of getting at above, I think it's actually most likely that Bill and Harold had the same opinion, which is that the original Ghostbusters is lightning in a bottle, and while many people love Ghostbusters II, it didn't seem to be as satisfying for any of the people who actually made the movie. Then you add 20 years and an entirely different film comedy landscape, and a much higher budget, and it all seems like a creative risk. Even Afterlife is a creative risk. Each movie that gets made -- just look at the reboot -- will exist forever, and leave its mark on the legacy of that original movie forever. Harold felt it was unlikely that they themselves would recapture that lightning, so it sounds like he was the one pitching the younger, hipper Ghostbusters.

I have said before and will say again: when the reboot was announced in 2014, I thought it sounded like a pretty ideal scenario. I also didn't think the guys were likely to recapture the magic (at the time I felt confident Bill wasn't going to be in it, Harold was already gone, Dan has Blues Brothers 2000 on his resume and I'm one of the ones who feel Ghostbusters II is weaker than Ghostbusters, and comedy sequels are generally bad), even though I was interested in whatever came out (I was confident Sony was gonna get the IP back up somehow). People on this board will say, "we were promised a sequel, it's what we always wanted," but I was always skeptical. I find sequels very interesting and will generally watch any sequel to something I love, but I always hold my breath. Obviously, neither myself as a pro-rebooter or the people who only wanted a new movie to be Ghostbusters 3 were wrong, it's subjective opinion, but one movie also couldn't serve us both, and that's just taking two POVs into account -- across the fanbase, there are certainly thousands more.

This is another dimension that Harold was no doubt aware of. Do people want new, younger Ghostbusters, or do they only wanna see the original team suit up again? We're still debating that now with Afterlife! Given Ghostbusters had been a pop culture object for decades, and he probably met fans of it all the time, he must've known that every fan is writing their own individual idea of what they want the series to do next, and you can't please everyone. He and Dan may be the guys that created it, but the audience forms a relationship with the material too, and respecting both their own needs to do something new and creative, the fans' wildly differing expectations, and the financial obligations of the studio is a challenging trick.

The one thing I will say, however, is that Dan is imaginative. Ghostbusters II makes the mistake of repeating the original movie structurally, making them underdogs again, but to his great credit, a river of slime leading to a possessed painting is nothing at all like an apartment building built as a ghost antenna designed to bring about the end of the world by a mad cultist, and those things are nothing like frame-jumping out of reality into a hellish alternate universe. If I have one major trepidation about Afterlife, it's whether or not returning to the Shandor well will feel fresh or if it'll feel like more of the same.
robbritton, RichardLess liked this
#4935136
droidguy1119 wrote: May 23rd, 2020, 11:09 am
Alphagaia wrote: May 23rd, 2020, 2:01 am Before I can get into details. What do you mean with the 200 M? ATC is reported to have lost 70 M in BO, not 200.

I can understand if you don't want to count merchandise, but I made sure to count merchandise royalties especially tied to the ATC brand, not the regular brand.

I feel it's very fair to count all the profits a movie generates, as the royalties are tied to the ATC name, but I feel DVD sales, Blue Ray sales, VOD and Netflix royalties already bring in a chunk of cash to fill the 70 M void. 35+ million just in N-America ( not accounting production costs to make them and marketing, ofcourse), but we can easily double that amount if you bring in the rest of the world.

Not sure how much if that 70+ M is profit, but production is cheap and even half is already a big chunk of profit. And that's just one piece of the pie.

If you mean they made 200M on videosales, I'd love to know where you got that number if you could share!) as if half of that would be profits that already covers the BO loss.
When Paul Feig said the movie needed to make $500m in theaters for the studio to consider it a success, that's not really an exaggeration. Ghostbusters (2016) cost $144m (maybe $148m, if the $3-4m reshoots that Dan incorrectly exaggerated to $30-40m weren't accounted for in that number). Then, as is the standard for these kinds of movies, the studio goes and spends the same amount of money again on marketing, bringing the cost up to $288m-$296m. On top of that, you must factor in whichever actors or crew had gross participation in the movie, and take out the theater cut. The rule of thumb used to be that a movie had to make 2x its production budget to be in the black, but nowadays it's more like 3x. So we can't say for sure that Ghostbusters (2016) actually starts making any money until it has $432m-$444m.

When I talk merch, I do think, say, Ghostbusters (2016) toys and things count in terms of the movie making money, but I was drawing a line between those items and merch that simply furthers the brand generally. The reboot resulted in those action figures of the original team with the 3D logo you could assemble if you bought all four being put into Toys 'R' Uses. DVDs and Blu-rays of the original two movies were restocked everywhere, with a free iron-on patch in the plastic wrap at Walmart. There were Ghostbusters school supplies with the logo, like the tin carrying case that came with the little card offering VUDU copies of some "Real Ghostbusters" episodes. That stuff doesn't count, in my book, because Sony could've sold that stuff at any time. Also, I feel like the IDW comics are sort of their own thing, so I would not attribute success of those comics back to the box office of the movie, especially since the comic counterparts are still going.

In any case, we don't know how much money 2016-specific merch cost, nor how much it made. I still see 2016 Funko Pops in bargain bins in stores, so I have to guess the merch went over about as well as the movie, which is to say, significantly less successful than the studio hoped.

That leaves the home video stats. Home video stats are not really reported on like theatrical box office and numbers are often scarce. Looking up the one site that reports on this information, I see I had my numbers wrong: the reboot made significantly less money that I said in my previous post. Financial data on this site only goes through the first week of 2017, but between US DVD and Blu-ray sales, the movie made only $38.8m more on video.

https://www.the-numbers.com/movie/Ghost ... ab=summary

So, box office plus video through the first week of 2017 (after which it would continue to dwindle) only gets us to a paltry $267.8m, which is still $164.2m short of the lowest end of the benchmark of the movie's success. We have no data on the merch but it's not covering all of that, bringing us close to the $70m number that Sony is pegged to have lost on the movie (which in this case is probably a low estimate of how much they lost).
RichardLess wrote: May 23rd, 2020, 2:52 am That only thing that surprises me in those quotes is hearing Harold say his heart wasn’t into it. You have to wonder if the deterioration of the Murray/Ramis relationship had something to do with it. Knowing that Bill wouldn’t be a big part of it and it wouldn’t be like it was.

Also, is Harold saying here, when he said he had a “different take” on GB3, that the idea for the new GBs was his? So I wonder if Dan’s original thing was “it’s just the usual group of GBs, the 4 of us” and Harold thought it would work better with a younger cast.

I still think the GB3 Hellbent *idea* is solid. It’s New York, It’s not Gozer again...the only problem is that the idea might be too big, ya know? But it sounds fantastic to me. But that goes against my usual notion of that my favourite parts of Ghostbusters isn’t the busting ghosts big action stuff. It’s the character stuff. Watching the guys sit and eat at a table, Harold & Dan hanging out in the fire house investigating—talking about what they are going to have for dinner, Rays Occult Book Shop, Shopping for real estate & talking mortgages. That’s the good stuff. So long as Hellbent had plenty of those moments I’m good.
Like robbritton is kind of getting at above, I think it's actually most likely that Bill and Harold had the same opinion, which is that the original Ghostbusters is lightning in a bottle, and while many people love Ghostbusters II, it didn't seem to be as satisfying for any of the people who actually made the movie. Then you add 20 years and an entirely different film comedy landscape, and a much higher budget, and it all seems like a creative risk. Even Afterlife is a creative risk. Each movie that gets made -- just look at the reboot -- will exist forever, and leave its mark on the legacy of that original movie forever. Harold felt it was unlikely that they themselves would recapture that lightning, so it sounds like he was the one pitching the younger, hipper Ghostbusters.

I have said before and will say again: when the reboot was announced in 2014, I thought it sounded like a pretty ideal scenario. I also didn't think the guys were likely to recapture the magic (at the time I felt confident Bill wasn't going to be in it, Harold was already gone, Dan has Blues Brothers 2000 on his resume and I'm one of the ones who feel Ghostbusters II is weaker than Ghostbusters, and comedy sequels are generally bad), even though I was interested in whatever came out (I was confident Sony was gonna get the IP back up somehow). People on this board will say, "we were promised a sequel, it's what we always wanted," but I was always skeptical. I find sequels very interesting and will generally watch any sequel to something I love, but I always hold my breath. Obviously, neither myself as a pro-rebooter or the people who only wanted a new movie to be Ghostbusters 3 were wrong, it's subjective opinion, but one movie also couldn't serve us both, and that's just taking two POVs into account -- across the fanbase, there are certainly thousands more.

This is another dimension that Harold was no doubt aware of. Do people want new, younger Ghostbusters, or do they only wanna see the original team suit up again? We're still debating that now with Afterlife! Given Ghostbusters had been a pop culture object for decades, and he probably met fans of it all the time, he must've known that every fan is writing their own individual idea of what they want the series to do next, and you can't please everyone. He and Dan may be the guys that created it, but the audience forms a relationship with the material too, and respecting both their own needs to do something new and creative, the fans' wildly differing expectations, and the financial obligations of the studio is a challenging trick.

The one thing I will say, however, is that Dan is imaginative. Ghostbusters II makes the mistake of repeating the original movie structurally, making them underdogs again, but to his great credit, a river of slime leading to a possessed painting is nothing at all like an apartment building built as a ghost antenna designed to bring about the end of the world by a mad cultist, and those things are nothing like frame-jumping out of reality into a hellish alternate universe. If I have one major trepidation about Afterlife, it's whether or not returning to the Shandor well will feel fresh or if it'll feel like more of the same.
Well we don’t agree on a lot but I agree with everything you said here 100%.
tylergfoster liked this
#4935137
The 500m Feig talked about was the point where it earned a sequel, not where it broke even. Movies that just break even don't earn a sequel. Movies that made a certain amount of profit do.

While Feig didn't talk about the possibility of a sequel, the director did indicate he regretted once saying the movie would need to have made $500 million to earn a sequel, sarcastically saying, "That was really smart of me to put that out there in the press."

Furthermore, your timeline doesn't add up as the 70m was already reported before they even knew the DVDsales and such.

There is also an amusement park ride based on ATC in Germany and GB hotel rooms that were booked full for years, plus the Void VR stations that were booked for 3+ years that were so successful it expanded from one to 5 stations worldwide.

I think it's safe to say they made that 70 M
Last edited by Alphagaia on May 23rd, 2020, 12:18 pm, edited 2 times in total.
#4935138
robbritton wrote: May 23rd, 2020, 7:18 am I’m never sure why there needs to be a behind the scenes falling out for the principals to have become tired of the franchise. It’s small fry in comparison, but I have old bands that (very!) small groups of fans would love to see reform, but we just got bored of those songs. No fall out, no skullduggery, just sometimes a creative thing means less to the people in it than it does to those that love it. It’s entirely reasonable that any of them would be bored of ghostbusters without it necessarily being about the Ramis/Murray rift.
It is reasonable, but in this case, I don’t know. Have you read Violet Ramis’s book? She gets into how hurt he was over the Bill situation. With Harold thinking “I’ll direct it” and “I’ll help write it”, yet saying years later his heart wasn’t in it, knowing that Bill wouldn’t be a big part of the movie, I don’t get a sense that Ghostbusters bored him. I mean, any chance he got to speak about Ghostbusters he did, he’s great in the DVD commentary, made right around the time GB Hellbent was kicking around. He helped out with the video game. Was involved in some capacity during the Alive Again era.

Oh, as a side note, Bill did a guest spot on a podcast with Steve Kerr and...some other guy, on the website The Ringer. There’s a small bit towards the end where they ask him the work he’s proudest of, or the work where everything was clicking with the cast and it was magical. Bill thinks for a bit and says “Ghostbusters”. He then talks for a bit about how wonderful, but hard, the shoot was. That they knew they were making comedy magic. He talks about seeing the Slimer bust for the first time and just feeling like what they were doing was something special. He mentioned Ghostbusters & Stripes as two examples. It was cool to hear him talk with such enthusiasm about Ghostbusters.
#4935139
Alphagaia wrote: May 23rd, 2020, 12:06 pm The 500m Feig talked about was the point where it earned a sequel, not where it broke even. Movies that just break even don't earn a sequel. That meant they already earned a hefty profit.

While Feig didn't talk about the possibility of a sequel, the director did indicate he regretted once saying the movie would need to have made $500 million to earn a sequel, sarcastically saying, "That was really smart of me to put that out there in the press."

Furthermore, your timeline doesn't add up as the 70m was already reported before they even knew the DVDsales and such.

There is also an amusement park ride based on ATC in Germany and GB hotel rooms that were booked full for years, plus the Void VR stations that were booked for 3+ years that were so successful it expanded from one to 5 stations worldwide.

I think it's safe to say they made that 70 M
There’s got to be a movie made somewhere that made a profit of $0.01. I wonder what movie it is...

I’ve thought for years that someone should do a mass investigation into the way Hollywood reports it’s financials. Subpoena’s and shit.

Warner Bros infamously reported a loss on Harry Potter & The Order of the Phoenix. Seriously. Google that shit. It’s fascinating.

Or the story of how Paramount reported the financials of the 2001 Tomb Raider film despite using some obscure German film tax credit to basically break even before the cameras rolled.

Or how Paramount Pictures operated as a money laundering operation during the 1980s.

Because you have to wonder how the business survives. Movies are so god damn expensive to produce and market, they split the revenue with the theatres...before they had Home Video. Now it’s like...how is that a business model?

Before foreign grosses became so important movie companies would sell the rights to local film companies to reduce the risk. Major Hollywood studios stopped doing that by & large when New Line sold the foreign on Fellowship of the Ring as insurance in case the movie flopped. Sure they made the budget back on the trilogy, which filmed all at once(well...not really but that’s another story) but they lost hundreds of millions on the foreign markets.
#4935140
Alphagaia wrote: May 23rd, 2020, 12:06 pm The 500m Feig talked about was the point where it earned a sequel, not where it broke even. Movies that just break even don't earn a sequel. Movies that made a certain amount of profit do.
While Feig didn't talk about the possibility of a sequel, the director did indicate he regretted once saying the movie would need to have made $500 million to earn a sequel, sarcastically saying, "That was really smart of me to put that out there in the press."
Furthermore, your timeline doesn't add up as the 70m was already reported before they even knew the DVDsales and such.

There is also an amusement park ride based on ATC in Germany and GB hotel rooms that were booked full for years, plus the Void VR stations that were booked for 3+ years that were so successful it expanded from one to 5 stations worldwide.

I think it's safe to say they made that 70 M
Look, like I said, we both love the movie, but the shady Hollywood accounting RichardLess mentions is always designed to protect the studio -- they obviously don't want to say they lost money.

The math puts "break even" at $450-ish and Feig threw out a rough number of $500m, so that's a $50m difference. A $500m grosser might make $180m to $200m or so on video, and then you have $250m of profit. Plus, the rule of thumb is supposed to have clearance so you can safely and confidently say it was profitable, so that actual break-even is probably more like $400m or so. In any case, the movie was over $100m short of that.
Last edited by tylergfoster on May 23rd, 2020, 10:55 pm, edited 1 time in total.
#4935141
My problem with your logic is you add bonuses for actors and such while these would only be paid when there is a profit, and you never arrive at the number calculated by the news. Instead of doubling the costs as widely reported you triple it while using a quote from Feig for a sequel. It could believe it better if you gave proven examples instead of just saying things no one else in the business says.

Even that 70M is questionable, and this article even admits they will break even via indirect revenue:

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/ ... ely-918515
>"This loss calculation is way off," says the Sony rep. "With multiple revenue streams, including consumer products, gaming, location-based entertainment, continued international rollout, and huge third-party promotional partnerships that mitigated costs, the bottom line, even before co-financing, is not remotely close to that number."
The studio has said break-even would be $300 million.
and: https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/20 ... ffice-loss
T.H.R. reports that Sony disputes its loss calculation, pointing out that additional revenue streams outside the movie itself (e.g. merchandising deals) can help make up the difference.
#4935144
ATC bombed, get over it.

There might not be Afterlife news, but you're all in luck!

There's a dedicated ATC section of this site to squabble over box office numbers.
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#4935148
deadderek wrote: May 23rd, 2020, 5:37 pm ATC bombed, get over it.

There might not be Afterlife news, but you're all in luck!

There's a dedicated ATC section of this site to squabble over box office numbers.
Actually that thread got locked. There was an entire ATC box office thread that got a little heated(which I may or may not have been partly to blame for) and then locked.
Alphagaia, ccv66, deadderek liked this
#4935153
Alphagaia wrote: May 23rd, 2020, 3:19 pm My problem with your logic is you add bonuses for actors and such while these would only be paid when there is a profit, and you never arrive at the number calculated by the news. Instead of doubling the costs as widely reported you triple it while using a quote from Feig for a sequel. It could believe it better if you gave proven examples instead of just saying things no one else in the business says.

Even that 70M is questionable, and this article even admits they will break even via indirect revenue:

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/ ... ely-918515
>"This loss calculation is way off," says the Sony rep. "With multiple revenue streams, including consumer products, gaming, location-based entertainment, continued international rollout, and huge third-party promotional partnerships that mitigated costs, the bottom line, even before co-financing, is not remotely close to that number."
The studio has said break-even would be $300 million.
and: https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/20 ... ffice-loss
T.H.R. reports that Sony disputes its loss calculation, pointing out that additional revenue streams outside the movie itself (e.g. merchandising deals) can help make up the difference.
The basic gist of Hollywood accounting is that if the film seems like it made a boatload then the creative accounting is to prevent giving away too much money. If the film seems like it bombed, well, of course, it actually didn't do that bad. What investment does an industry publication like THR have in saying the film did poorly, and what investment does the studio have to try and save face?

The kind of payout deals that above-the-line talent have are not necessarily profit-based. On the Superman movie that never got made, Tim Burton had something called a "pay-or-play" deal, for example -- he got a $10m payday for directing no matter what, even when the movie didn't get made at all (funny enough, this leads to another notorious story of "Hollywood accounting, in which Superman Returns had to eat costs like this accrued on every unmade Superman movie between Superman IV and Returns).

All I can tell you is I wrote for Boxoffice Magazine for several years. If you don't want to take my word, that's your prerogative. I have nothing further to add.
#4935191
Hairy Biker wrote: May 24th, 2020, 3:37 pm Yeah, Australia.

Our restrictions are easing.
Pubs n clubs, tattoo parlours, entertainment venues etc officially reopen on the 1st.
Same here in the Netherlands, with a maximum of 30 people per room, which will go up in September to a 100 if all goes well.

No plans to go beyond that without a vaccine though, so I wouldn't get my hopes up this means GBA gets released this year, as a worldwide vaccine takes a long time to replicate.
#4935227
RichardLess wrote: May 23rd, 2020, 2:52 am
droidguy1119 wrote: May 23rd, 2020, 12:32 am Well, first of all, I shouldn't have said "offered." I meant it in a broad sense. A more accurate way to put what I meant was, the idea of Harold directing it came up as a possibility in conversation between himself, Aykroyd, and Reitman, and Harold considered it a hypothetically interesting challenge and expressed interest in doing it.

I went and looked up some Ramis interviews, and here's some quotes I found:

From an outlet called Film Monthly (http://www.filmmonthly.com/Profiles/Art ... rvest.html):

Gary: I'll get it out of the way. What's with the Ghostbusters 3 rumors?

Harold: You know it came out of interviews for The Ice Harvest. People have been asking for years, "will there be a Ghostbusters 3?" And I went into some detail, saying Danny had written a script and it had some promising concepts. He and I worked on revising it. I was going to direct it. This was years ago. He and I had young Ghostbusters in mind. We were going to return as the bosses.

At AICN (http://legacy.aintitcool.com/node/21858):

Quint: I know you're probably sick of it, but the AICN readers would kill me if I didn't bring up Ghostbusters 3. I know a few years ago it was getting hot and then just seemed to disappear. What's going on with it?

Harold: Yeah, Danny and I actually played around for a while... Aykroyd had a great concept. He called me and said, "I got it. I got Ghostbusters 3." I said, "What is it?" He said, "Ghostbusters go to Hell! This is it!" (laughs)

Quint: So is there a chance that it'll still happen?

Harold: Well, the script was viable. Dan is the most imaginative person. He went off on a tangent. 90% of the movie is a special effect set entirely in Hell, you know. I had a whole different take on it. Really, it was the business that stopped it. I never thought that the public wanted to see the three of us kind of stuffed into our jumpsuits again. I thought we would introduce three new Ghostbusters, but maybe we'd be around as Senior Ghostbusters, running the company or something, but the real adventure would be...and this was so long ago, we were thinking Chris Rock, Chris Farley and Ben Stiller taking over. That would have worked.

And we had the script all worked out. Danny and I had the story and Murray got really... Murray's so cantankerous, you know. Dan called him and said, "Would you be in the movie?" And he said, "I'll be in the movie... but only as a ghost."

Quint: That would have been awesome!

Harold: (laughs) It would have been interesting. So, we even created a story around that. In the end, it sounds greedy, but the deal couldn't be made. We as an entity... Me... well, I'm low man on that totem pole deal-wise, but Ivan, Bill, Danny and me couldn't make a deal with the studio. There wasn't enough left for the studio.

And I can't say my heart was really in it, you know...making the third one.

Finally, over at MovieWeb (https://movieweb.com/exclusive-laughing ... old-ramis/):

MovieWeb: Is there ever any talk or possibility of you and Bill Murray working together again in the future? Might we ever see Ghostbusters 3?

Harold: I think it’s very doubtful. Dan Aykroyd and I tried to get that off the ground once. Dan had a real good idea, I thought it was very funny. He had more energy for it than I did, so he did most of the writing but I said I would direct it if we ever got it going.


Look, everyone knows I'm a Ghostbusters (2016) defender, but Sony definitely, unquestionably lost millions of dollars on that movie. The entire reason studios want to make money before video is because video pretty much has no hope of saving an expensive flop. The movie has, almost certainly, not made more than $200m more on video (existing sales data caps out at around $120m), and video of course has its own promotional and production costs, so, yeah, video did not close the gap enough for the movie to have been profitable.

(Now, Sony might've come out ahead overall in terms of moving merch that is tied to the brand, but that is not necessarily the same thing, and I definitely think it's fudging to consider that part of the reboot's financial success.)

That only thing that surprises me in those quotes is hearing Harold say his heart wasn’t into it. You have to wonder if the deterioration of the Murray/Ramis relationship had something to do with it. Knowing that Bill wouldn’t be a big part of it and it wouldn’t be like it was.

Also, is Harold saying here, when he said he had a “different take” on GB3, that the idea for the new GBs was his? So I wonder if Dan’s original thing was “it’s just the usual group of GBs, the 4 of us” and Harold thought it would work better with a younger cast.

I still think the GB3 Hellbent *idea* is solid. It’s New York, It’s not Gozer again...the only problem is that the idea might be too big, ya know? But it sounds fantastic to me. But that goes against my usual notion of that my favourite parts of Ghostbusters isn’t the busting ghosts big action stuff. It’s the character stuff. Watching the guys sit and eat at a table, Harold & Dan hanging out in the fire house investigating—talking about what they are going to have for dinner, Rays Occult Book Shop, Shopping for real estate & talking mortgages. That’s the good stuff. So long as Hellbent had plenty of those moments I’m good.

Also...Chris Farley as a Ghostbuster just never sounded right to me. Farley is a loud obnoxious kind of comedy guy. Subtle is not his style.

I always thought Robert Downey Jr, Helen Hunt, Dave Chappele & Norm Macdonald would’ve been my ideal 1990s early 2000s cast. Maybe slot David Duchovney in there or Jon Stewart. I can just see that cast being magic together.
Harold's different take was another idea of what "hell" should be in the movie. While Dan had a generic horror hell, all Dante, in mind, Harold's hell was more comedy. It was NYC, but everybody speaks another language, nothing really works. He said it would be like the worst things in modern life...
I think that's a more creative, less generic way, but personally, I'm glad the hell thing didn't happen. It's way too big and I love the grounded in reality attitude of Ghostbusters.
#4935329
Could be absolutely nothing, but over the past couple days the official Ghostbusters account on YouTube has put up a couple GB1 related things.

Hopefully in about a week for Ghostbusters Day we get some sort of new video even if not necessarily a trailer.
#4935336
Timo wrote: May 25th, 2020, 6:32 pm Harold's different take was another idea of what "hell" should be in the movie. While Dan had a generic horror hell, all Dante, in mind, Harold's hell was more comedy. It was NYC, but everybody speaks another language, nothing really works. He said it would be like the worst things in modern life...
The way Harold described his idea was essentially what Aykroyd had written. The "nothing works, traffic/lines never move, most annoying parts of modern society" element of hell was present in Aykroyd's script. Keep in mind Aykroyd and Ramis collaborated on a treatment prior to Aykroyd writing his first draft, which was different than how development kicked off on GB and GB2. They had the general idea and high points worked out. I'm guessing Harold's work on Hellbent was more character-based stuff, which is famously what the Aykroyd draft of Hellbent lacked. Par for course.

Still waiting for that coffee table book, Sony.
deadderek wrote: May 31st, 2020, 8:15 am Could be absolutely nothing, but over the past couple days the official Ghostbusters account on YouTube has put up a couple GB1 related things.

Hopefully in about a week for Ghostbusters Day we get some sort of new video even if not necessarily a trailer.
I noticed the content popping up, but I didn't realize how close we are to GB Day! Fingers crossed for something cool. :love:
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