Ghostbusters 3
6 min read
"Ghostbusters 3" (more often written Ghostbusters III) was the working title for a proposed third entry in the original Ghostbusters film series that was never produced. The project moved through several writing teams and concepts over roughly 25 years, from the early 1990s until 2014, but it was never greenlit in a form everyone would commit to. In the fall of 2014 Sony shifted its focus to a reboot, the 2016 Ghostbusters film, and a direct continuation of the original continuity eventually arrived instead as Ghostbusters: Afterlife, released on November 19, 2021, from a script by Jason Reitman and Gil Kenan.1
The recurring obstacle through nearly every version was Bill Murray. Because the four principals plus Ivan Reitman effectively controlled the property, the film could not move forward without all of them agreeing, and Murray repeatedly declined to commit. More than once a draft reached the point of being greenlit on the condition that Murray sign on, only for the project to stall when he did not.2
The Hellbent era
The earliest sustained attempt is documented separately as Ghostbusters III: Hellbent, an unused script by Dan Aykroyd and Tom Davis. This version was in development across roughly the mid-1990s into the 2000s.
Columbia Pictures approached Ivan Reitman about another Ghostbusters film in January 1992, after he set aside plans for a Marx Brothers biopic.3 Aykroyd's interest renewed in 1996 in the wake of his role in Tommy Boy, and he began discussing a third film with Sony built around a team of new, younger Ghostbusters. He had Chris Farley in mind for a role and was enthusiastic about Will Smith as well. Harold Ramis was unsure about co-writing but offered story ideas, so Aykroyd brought in Tom Davis to help. Aykroyd's core concept was to send the Ghostbusters to Hell to face the Devil.4
Aykroyd completed a first draft in September 1996 and a story treatment by early 1997. With Murray and Sigourney Weaver passing, he began writing a version without Peter Venkman. The project lost momentum after Chris Farley died in December 1997.5 Through 1998 Aykroyd and Ramis still had a treatment they liked, but Murray and Reitman remained uninterested, and the concept never reached production.6
The Hellbent script itself sent the surviving Ghostbusters into an alternate, hellish version of Manhattan called Manhellton, a mirror city where the people and places are infernal versions of the real ones. A 1997 treatment opens with the dead refusing to stay dead: a corpse climbs out of her coffin to go home, bodies stir in the city morgue, and a new junior team built around Ray's nephew Frank Stantz handles the calls. Ray Stantz, Egon Spengler, and Winston Zeddemore discover that souls are being blocked from crossing into the afterlife, build a "phase flux generator" to shift themselves to the other side, and find that the afterlife resembles a corrupted New York. Peter Venkman is written as off in Indonesia, and the Ghostbusters operation has grown into a thriving company since the Vigo incident of the second film.