It also, in a series first, depicts characters discussing the great implications of ghosts existing.
All that and more is partially because of Gil Kenan.
Kenan, alifelong Ghostbusters fan, co-wrote Afterlife withfellow fan and filmmaker Jason Reitman.
Director Gil Kenan on the set of Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire.Image: Sony Pictures
For that earlier film, Reitman took the helm.
Answers to questions like, where is Oscar, the son of original Ghostbusters character Dana?
Will some of these new characters come back?
Image: Sony Pictures
And how important is it to get all of these things in there?
Read Kenans explanations in io9s interview below.
It made me wonder, what in this movie came out of developing or brainstorming Afterlife?
Image: Sony Pictures
Were there ideas you had then that simply couldnt fit in and you held for a potential second movie?
io9: But theres always a danger that you dont get to make another one, right?
And obviously, you always hope you get to do a million of them.
Image: Sony Pictures
But how do you know what to hold back?
io9: No, it feels like a good balance.
Im just wondering, how much do you have to restrain yourself?
Image: Sony Pictures
How much do you say, I have to get this in now, just in case?
Its a big story and a lot of characters to be balancing throughout the film.
And so I think its an expansive story.
Its a huge canvas.
And there were things we sort of had as instinctslike this idea of spirit-loaded objects.
Now, obviously, a movie needs a good story, good characters.
Was it important to you guys to touch on the kind of secondary things in addition to the story?
Tell me a little bit about developing those things.
Kenan: Thats the richness of this universe, right?
First of all, youve got to think back, this is now a 40-year tradition of storytelling.
Theres an inner life to the world of ghostbusting.
Theyre in a world where a proton pack can be built.
you could sort of extrapolate in other directions.
And that prospects really thrilling, actually.
Its sort of what makes the idea of Ghostbusters existing at all so compelling.
Its such a simple hook that Dan Aykroyd had all those years ago.
io9: Thats so cool.
I also love that this movie just drops us in on the action.
Was any of that shot or in the script?
Kenan: We made a decisive choice as writers to leap forward two years in time.
And that tarp was flapping and you see sort of Ecto-1 behind it.
That was our way of hooking it into the events that Frozen Empire was going to be delving into.
We wrote sketches of stories of what happened in those intervening years.
And so we actually developed those as comic books.
And theyre coming out in a week or two, and theyre really cool.
And they fill in those two years from Oklahoma to the events of Frozen Empire.
io9: Okay great.
Can you clear up?
Are they actually married?
Kenan: If they are, its news to me.
io9: Okay, what about Danas son Oscar?
There was speculation he might appear in one of these movies.
Kenan: We love Oscar.
We have an idea of where he is.
Its possible hell show up in a future installment, but we dont have that worked out yet.
io9: And what about the identity of Callies mom and Phoebe and Trevors dad?
Is that purposely being held back, or is just something that doesnt matter?
They are the elements that put us together but are not our current story or our current drama.
Its the same way with Phoebes dad and Callies mom.
They are important building blocks to those characters, but they dont figure in their day-to-day life.
Thats something that I think a lot of audiences, for better or worse, can relate to.
Thats how we approach the writing of these characters.
Kenan: Look, were simple guys.
We just want the very, very best comedians in the world to join this franchise.
And it was the same with James Acaster as with Kumail and with Patton.
These guys are assassins, and they bring their A-game to this film.
From very early stages we had an idea about who his character was going to be.
He came in to have conversations with us as we were writing the script.
And we really shaped this arc for him, with him.
So, I hope were lucky enough to make more.
And I wouldnt count any of them out.
Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire is now in theaters.Read our review here.
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