Plot
The four leads are Erin Gilbert (Kristen Wiig), a physicist seeking tenure at Columbia University; Abby Yates (Melissa McCarthy), Erin's former research partner in the study of the paranormal; Jillian Holtzmann (Kate McKinnon), an eccentric engineer who builds the team's equipment; and Patty Tolan (Leslie Jones), a New York City transit worker with deep knowledge of the city. Years earlier, Erin and Abby co-authored a book arguing that ghosts are real, work Erin had since tried to distance herself from to protect her academic standing. The pair reunite when reports of paranormal activity around New York draw them back together.
Investigating a haunting at a historic mansion museum, the women encounter a full-bodied apparition and confirm that ghosts exist. Patty, who works for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, joins the group after she sees a spirit on a subway platform built beneath the site of a former prison, bringing a working knowledge of the city's history to a team otherwise made up of scientists. They set up shop, first above a Chinese restaurant and later in a firehouse, and hire Kevin Beckman (Chris Hemsworth), a strikingly inept receptionist. As they refine their proton-based equipment, they discover that the surge in hauntings is not random. Rowan North (Neil Casey), a disturbed loner, is planting homemade devices across the city at points along ley lines, the alignments of which intersect at a Times Square hotel, in order to weaken the barrier between the world of the living and the world of the dead and unleash a ghost invasion.
The team's growing public profile draws the attention of city officials, who privately accept that the threat is real while publicly dismissing the women as frauds to avoid panic. A pair of federal agents shadow the group and try to keep their activities quiet. Rowan's plan culminates in a tear in reality over Times Square that releases a flood of spirits into Manhattan. After Rowan dies and crosses over, he returns in spectral form, possesses Kevin to direct the attack, and eventually takes the shape of a giant figure based on the Ghostbusters' own no-ghost logo. The four women fight back through the portal he has opened, defeat him, and seal the rift, saving the city. With the danger publicly proven, the team gains the city's quiet backing and a permanent base in the firehouse. The closing stretch nods to the original films, and a mid-credits exchange about a name from the earlier movies signals that further threats remain.
Development
A new Ghostbusters film spent the better part of three decades in development. Plans for a third entry in the original continuity surfaced repeatedly after Ghostbusters II in 1989, but the project never reached production. Dan Aykroyd was an early and persistent advocate for a sequel and wrote multiple drafts over the years, including a much-discussed version sometimes referred to as Ghostbusters: Hellbent that sent the team into a hellish mirror version of Manhattan. Successive scripts failed to win over the full group of principals. The recurring obstacle in press accounts was Bill Murray, who declined to commit, with Aykroyd later attributing that to Murray's dissatisfaction with the material rather than a refusal to participate in any sequel. Various writers were brought in over the years, and at points a third film came close to going forward, but it never cleared the hurdle of assembling the original cast.
The long-running effort, often discussed under the working label of a Ghostbusters III, lost momentum for good after Harold Ramis, co-writer and co-star of the first two films, died in February 2014. Ivan Reitman, who had developed the sequel and intended to direct, has said he felt he could not make a new film in the original continuity without the original four leads, and he stepped back from directing. With a direct sequel in that timeline no longer practical, Sony turned toward a fresh start.
On August 2, 2014, trade reports identified Paul Feig as the studio's leading choice to direct a reboot built around a team of female Ghostbusters, with a script to be written from scratch. Ivan Reitman, who had directed the original films and had been attached to the stalled third film, stepped back from directing and confirmed in September that he had met with Feig and would remain on the project as a producer. On October 8, 2014, Feig announced through Twitter that he was officially attached as director and would co-write the screenplay with Katie Dippold.
In interviews around the announcement, Feig described being approached by Sony and Reitman while he was in Budapest shooting Spy. After returning to the United States and meeting with Sony co-chairman Amy Pascal, he developed the idea of an all-female cast in a present-day setting where the existence of ghosts is not yet accepted. He framed the project as a restart and an origin story, noting that the film might include nods and cameos tied to the earlier movies while treating the broader continuity as open.
Internal Sony communications that surfaced during the company's 2014 data breach showed that executives had earlier weighed how to connect a new film to the original franchise, and that several actresses, including Melissa McCarthy, had expressed interest. By late January 2015, McCarthy had signed on, with Kristen Wiig, Kate McKinnon, and Leslie Jones in negotiations; Sony set an initial release date of July 22, 2016, later moved up one week to July 15. In February 2015, Dan Aykroyd confirmed he would serve as an executive producer and contribute to the script.
Reports during development indicated that the budget, originally set higher under Amy Pascal, was reduced after Tom Rothman took over Sony's film operations, prompting script adjustments to control costs. Feig stated that he wanted genuinely frightening ghosts at the center of the film and a grounded, workplace-comedy tone, and that he favored practical effects with as little computer-generated imagery as practical.
Casting
McCarthy, Wiig, McKinnon, and Jones were assembled as the central quartet over the first half of 2015. McCarthy and Wiig were established film leads, and both had worked with Feig before, McCarthy on Bridesmaids, The Heat, and Spy, and Wiig on Bridesmaids. McKinnon and Jones were drawn from the cast of Saturday Night Live, the program where Wiig had also built her reputation before moving into films. The four roles loosely echoed the archetypes of the original team without mapping onto them directly: Erin and Abby anchor the group as the believers turned professionals, Holtzmann is the inventive, unpredictable engineer, and Patty is the streetwise outsider who rounds out the lineup.
Chris Hemsworth joined in June 2015 as the team's receptionist, Kevin, a role written as a comic inversion of the glamorous-assistant archetype, in which a strikingly handsome man proves almost completely useless at the job. Neil Casey was cast as the villain Rowan in July.
The supporting cast came to include Andy Garcia as the mayor of New York, Michael Kenneth Williams and Matt Walsh as federal agents, Charles Dance as a university dean, and Cecily Strong as a city official.
Cameo appearances by veterans of the earlier films were arranged over the course of production. Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Sigourney Weaver, Annie Potts, and Ernie Hudson each appear as new characters rather than reprising their original roles; Potts plays a hotel desk clerk and Weaver appears as Holtzmann's mentor. Rick Moranis declined an invitation to appear, explaining that he did not see the appeal of a single day's shooting on a project so far removed from his earlier work. Feig also confirmed that members of Harold Ramis's family would appear in the film, and a bust of Ramis is seen on the Columbia University campus in the finished movie.
Filming
Principal photography began on June 18, 2015, in the Boston area and concluded on September 19, 2015, in New York City. The production used the code name Flapjack. Feig confirmed early on that interior work would be based in Boston while a number of exteriors would be shot in New York.
A large share of the shoot took place in and around Boston, which served as the base for interior work and many exteriors. Locations included the former Everett High School, which was dressed as a New York middle school and draped with banners for the fictional science institute, along with sites in Malden and downtown Boston. The first set photos to surface, in mid-June 2015, showed Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, and Kate McKinnon in costume outside the Everett school. A building near Harrison Avenue and Essex Street was dressed as a Chinese restaurant for the team's first headquarters, and in July the production leased a former naval air station at SouthField, where a large aircraft hangar served as a green-screen and special-effects stage. The Castle at Boston University stood in for the historic mansion museum seen early in the film, and the Ames Mansion at Borderland State Park in Easton was used for additional mansion scenes.
The production moved to New York City in September 2015 for exterior photography, concentrated in Lower Manhattan and Midtown. The Ecto-1 and a two-wheeled companion vehicle, Ecto-2, were photographed around Tribeca, Chambers Street, and the area south of Central Park, with Wiig seen driving the car. Filming also took place near Columbia University in Morningside Heights. Feig announced that principal photography had wrapped on September 19, 2015, sharing a photo taken at the firehouse used in the original films, and Ernie Hudson shot his cameo on set that day.
Feig has said he shot the film digitally because he needed long, continuous takes for the improvisational comedy, and that the team worked long days without a meal break. He shot extensively with practical effects, including slime developed through a process he described as testing many formulas and thicknesses before settling on a recipe. Chris Hemsworth completed his scenes in late August 2015, and various cameo performers, including Aykroyd, filmed their parts during the shoot. Dan Aykroyd's cameo, reported as a taxi driver who tells one of the leads "I ain't afraid of no ghosts," was filmed in July 2015.
Editing and post-production stretched into the first half of 2016. Feig finished an early cut in November 2015 and began test screening a version in March 2016. The film went through extensive recutting: a cameo by Sigourney Weaver was removed from an earlier version and then restored to the final cut, and a musical number was dropped because it was not working. A scheduled day and a half of reshoots took place in downtown Los Angeles in early May 2016, where performers were photographed on rigs operating proton equipment in mid-air. Some of the added material was reported to function as an in-joke aimed at the online reaction the project had already provoked, including a moment in which the characters read hostile comments about themselves. The scope and cost of the reshoots were later disputed, with accounts varying widely between figures floated by Aykroyd and the much smaller sums Sony cited. Additional dialogue replacement sessions and further test screenings continued through late May, and members of the original cast viewed the completed film in early June 2016. Adam Ray voiced the rebooted Slimer, a counterpart to the classic Slimer, and Robin Shelby voiced a related character.
Music
Theodore Shapiro composed the orchestral score, which Sony released separately on July 8, 2016. The film also leaned on a contemporary song soundtrack assembled in part to echo the original's pop tie-ins. A soundtrack album was issued through RCA Records on the film's opening day, July 15, 2016, collecting fourteen tracks, several of which had already been released as singles.
The centerpiece was a reworking of the 1984 Ray Parker Jr. theme. Recorded by Fall Out Boy with Missy Elliott and titled "Ghostbusters (I'm Not Afraid)," the new version replaced the original's bright, horn-driven groove with a heavier rock-and-electronic treatment built on aggressive guitars, urgent vocals, and a guest rap verse. It arrived as a single in June 2016, ahead of the album, and drew a mixed-to-negative response, with some listeners and outlets contrasting it unfavorably against the familiar original. The reaction stood in contrast to the lasting popularity of Parker's theme, which had been a chart-topping hit and an Academy Award nominee in 1984.
Other artists on the album included G-Eazy, 5 Seconds of Summer, Pentatonix, and Elle King, whose track "Good Girls" served as a lead single. Reviews of the assembled song package and of Shapiro's score were more divided than the warmly remembered music of the 1984 film and its sequel, though some critics found the score an effective and at times playful complement to the film's tone.
Marketing and controversy
The reboot drew unusually heavy public attention from the moment it was announced, and much of that attention was negative. The decision to recast the lead roles with women and to restart the franchise outside the original continuity generated extended online debate, beginning when the project was first reported in 2014 and continuing through the theatrical run.
The controversy crystallized around the marketing. Sony promoted the film with a 28-second teaser on February 13, 2016, followed by a full trailer in early March. The first full trailer became the most disliked movie trailer in YouTube history, accumulating several hundred thousand dislikes against a far smaller number of likes within weeks of its release. Commentators noted that reception on other platforms told a different story: the same trailer drew predominantly positive reactions on Facebook, which led some analysts to question how much of the YouTube dislike total reflected organized campaigning rather than ordinary audience sentiment.
Feig and members of the cast spoke publicly about the volume of hostile messages they received online, and Feig characterized a portion of the response as deeply misogynistic. Coverage in the trade and general press framed the episode as an early, widely cited example of a coordinated online backlash against a major studio film tied to its casting.
Leslie Jones in particular was subjected to a sustained campaign of racist and abusive messages on Twitter around the film's July release. After Jones publicized the harassment, the platform took action against participating accounts and permanently suspended the conservative commentator Milo Yiannopoulos, citing rules against inciting targeted abuse. The episode drew extensive news coverage, a wave of public support for Jones under the hashtag #LoveForLeslie, and a broader debate about how social platforms handle organized harassment. It is frequently cited as a landmark moment in that debate.
Feig noted in interviews that the title displayed at the end of the theatrical release was Ghostbusters: Answer the Call, a choice intended to give the film a distinct catalog identity without placing the longer name on the opening titles.
Release
Ghostbusters opened in the United States on July 15, 2016, in 3,963 theaters. It was rated PG-13. The film was released widely overseas through July and August 2016, often under localized titles such as SOS Fantômes in French-speaking territories and variations of Cazafantasmas across Latin America and Spain. International release began a day or two ahead of the domestic opening in a handful of markets.
The film was released for home viewing later in 2016. Sony announced a digital release on September 27 and a physical release of 4K, 3D, and standard Blu-ray editions on October 11, 2016. The home versions included the 134-minute extended cut and more than an hour of additional extended and alternate scenes, among them a deleted sequence introducing a love interest for Erin played by Justin Kirk.
Box office
Pre-release tracking in June 2016 projected an opening weekend of roughly $40 million to $50 million in the United States. The film grossed about $3.4 million from Thursday previews and went on to an opening weekend of $46,018,755, finishing second for the frame behind The Secret Life of Pets. That debut represented a little over a third of its eventual domestic total. The film also opened in first place in several international markets, including the United Kingdom and Australia.
In subsequent weeks the film's grosses fell off and international receipts came in below the studio's hopes. A significant factor abroad was the absence of a release in China, then one of the largest and fastest-growing film markets, where authorities did not approve the picture; coverage tied the decision to the country's restrictions on films involving the supernatural. By the end of its run, Ghostbusters had earned $128,350,574 in North America and roughly $100.7 million in other territories, for a worldwide total of about $229.1 million, against a production budget reported at $144 million.
Those returns were not enough to make the film profitable for Sony. Because of the large additional outlay on marketing, the studio indicated the picture would have needed to gross on the order of $300 million worldwide to break even. In August 2016, trade reports described the film as heading for a substantial loss, with one widely cited estimate placing it above $70 million. Sony disputed that characterization, arguing that consumer products, gaming, location-based entertainment, continued international release, and promotional partnerships materially offset the costs. Reporting around the budget was itself contested: a July 2016 account put production costs at $144 million with an additional $140 million spent on marketing, a production figure Sony rejected as inflated. It was also reported that a financing partner, LSC Film Corp., had withdrawn backing said to amount to about a quarter of the budget roughly a month before production began.
Critical reception
The film's reviews were generally positive but well short of unanimous, landing in mixed-to-favorable territory on the major aggregators. On Rotten Tomatoes it earned a Certified Fresh rating, with about 74 percent of roughly 390 critics rating it positively and an average score near 6.5 out of 10. On Metacritic, which weights and averages a smaller pool of reviews, it scored 60 out of 100 from 52 critics, a result the site classifies as mixed or average. Audience-facing measures were more favorable: opening-weekend moviegoers gave it a CinemaScore grade of B+, and the polling service PostTrak reported a majority of attendees recommending it.
Reviewers who responded warmly tended to credit the chemistry and comic timing of the central cast. McKinnon's performance as Holtzmann drew particular praise as a breakout, and several critics singled out Hemsworth's against-type turn as the dim receptionist. Writing in The New York Times, Manohla Dargis described the film as the kind of big-studio release that delivers a lot of enjoyable, disposable fun, and credited it with sidestepping some of the clichés often attached to female-led comedies. Round-ups of the early notices generally reported that the cast was the film's strongest asset.
Criticism centered on the screenplay and the production rather than the premise. A number of reviewers found the plotting thin and the pacing uneven, faulted an over-reliance on computer-generated effects in the climactic sequences, and felt the film leaned too heavily on callbacks to the original. Several writers pointed to choppy editing and tonal unevenness, suggesting that a sharper version of the movie was buried inside the one that reached theaters and that the picture rested heavily on its leads to carry weaker material. A recurring theme was that the movie struggled under the weight of the property's legacy, succeeding as a comedy more than as a reinvention of the franchise.
Audience scores diverged from the critical consensus and from one another in ways that themselves became part of the story. Some user-rating sites recorded markedly lower averages than the critics' aggregate, and the gap was widely attributed in part to coordinated downvoting connected to the pre-release backlash rather than to ordinary viewing reactions alone. Across the spectrum, much of the published commentary acknowledged that the film's reception could not be cleanly separated from the polarized discourse that had surrounded it for two years.
Legacy
Sony executives publicly characterized the launch as having revived the brand, but the film's financial performance ended the prospect of a direct continuation. Around the release, Feig said he had a story in mind for a follow-up and would be open to continuing, and screenwriter Katie Dippold and Sony distribution executives expressed interest without committing. No sequel to the 2016 film was produced.
Rather than extend the rebooted continuity, the franchise returned to the world of the original movies. In 2021 Sony released Ghostbusters: Afterlife, directed by Jason Reitman, son of Ivan Reitman, as a direct successor to the 1984 and 1989 films, bringing back original cast members in their original roles and centering the story on the descendants of one of them. A further sequel in that revived continuity, Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, followed in 2024. The 2016 reboot was effectively set aside as a self-contained entry, with later installments tracing their lineage to the 1984 film rather than to Feig's reimagining.
The film and the events surrounding it are frequently revisited in retrospective coverage. The trailer's record dislike count, the organized backlash against the casting, and the abuse directed at the cast, especially Leslie Jones, are cited as an early, heavily documented example of online reaction shaping the conversation around a major studio release. The reception also fed industry discussion about the risks of rebooting beloved properties and about the limits of aggregate scores as a measure of how a divisive film actually performed. For the Ghostbusters franchise specifically, the financial outcome marked a turning point: it ended the studio's plans for a new shared universe built on the reboot and steered the property back to the continuity of the original films, the direction it has followed since.
References
- Box Office Mojo, Ghostbusters (2016) box office summary
- The Numbers, Ghostbusters (2016) financial data
- Wikipedia, Ghostbusters (2016 film)
- Deadline, Ghostbusters opens with $46 million first weekend
- The Hollywood Reporter, Ghostbusters is the most disliked movie trailer in YouTube history
- CBS News, New Ghostbusters is the most disliked movie trailer in YouTube history
- Rotten Tomatoes, Ghostbusters (2016)
- Metacritic, Ghostbusters (2016) reviews
- Wikipedia, Ghostbusters (2016 soundtrack)
- Billboard, Fall Out Boy and Missy Elliott Ghostbusters theme reboot
- SlashFilm, How Ghostbusters 2016 paved the way for Ghostbusters: Afterlife
- NPR, Twitter permanently suspends Milo Yiannopoulos for targeted abuse of Leslie Jones
- CBC News, Milo Yiannopoulos banned from Twitter for harassing Leslie Jones
- Variety, Ghostbusters review round-up
- Screen Rant, Why Ghostbusters 3 took 31 years to make
- Screen Rant, Ghostbusters will not be released in China
