I know that complaing about Ghostbusters films has been both nerd culture and gauche since 1989, so I'll try to be brief. But it's weird that the new Ghostbusters movie looks bad, but it doesn't look bad in quite the same way as Afterlife did?
Like, Ghostbusters Afterlife was a bog standard legacy film - a half-assed passing of the torch that doesn't really pass the torch so much as invite a younger generation to be taught how awesome the original adventures were. This sucks for a whole lot of reasons - we can talk about the flaws of the Legacy Film as a trope at length - but they're also boring reasons. Afterlife sucks for a lot of the same reason Blade Runner 2049 or Jurassic World suck. But Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire looks bad because it seems like it's trying to do please like eighteen audiences at once. I mean, it's a bad sign when I get tonal whiplash from your trailer.
- It's a One Last Ride movie! There are shots of the three surviving classic Ghostbusters in jump suits! Venkman will make creeper jokes and Ray will say seemingly made up supernatural stuff that Dan Aykroyd actually kind of believes! Fans will love it!
- It's a family friendly adventure film! There are shots of the kids from the previous movie, indicating the torch has been passed. It's the Stranger Things' Kids turn, and the presence of kids means your whole family will enjoy it!
- It's a spooky ghost movie! There's discussion about how this ghost can literally scare you to death by making your blood run cold! The trailer shows a freezing human eye while talking about how your tearducts icing over will be the last thing you'll ever see and mentioning how several people have frozen to death. Before cutting to more kid hijinks.
- It's a superhero movie! All of New York is encased in bad CGI ice in the middle of the summer - and that's our inciting incident! Can you imagine how wild this is gonna get?! We have actual Ant-Man Paul Rudd on hand, Patton Oswalt is here, and they're gonna put together a team of the old guys and the kids to shoot CGI laser beams at other things with CGI laser beams in a big CGI climax that's bigger than anything Ghostbusters has ever done!!
And I dunno, man, this looks like a mess.
The last good one I remember was the new Scream, and that's mostly because a contract dispute and (spoiler) killing off one third of the original trio in the previous film meant that they actually had to focus on the new characters.
But besides that, how much more are we all willing to do this dance? Stories where a popular character gets older and is replaced by a new generation, only for all new media in the franchise to just use CGI de-aging to bring back the original (looking at you, dead-eyed Disney Plus Luke Skywalker) are so fucking tired.
The torch is never going to get passed down, and it's already burning pretty low. Might as well just snuff it out and move on.
