Proving once and for all that there’s no force in life or death capable of overwhelming the power of good, clean, old-fashioned nepotism—cut with just a hint of brimming fan nostalgia—Entertainment Weekly is reporting that Jason Reitman is getting his own Ghostbusters movie. The Thank You For Smoking director—who appeared as a child actor in the second film in the franchise, directed, like the first, by his dad, Ivan Reitman—announced today that the film is being produced by Sony Pictures, and will arrive in theaters next summer.
The Ghostbusters franchise has been in a quiet period of late, after the underwhelming box office response to Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, Leslie Jones, Kate McKinnon, and Paul Feig’s Ghostbusters reboot in 2016. Sony has had its ever-ridiculously named Ghost Corps department continually churning out ideas since, though, although it’s mostly just produced a bunch of overly optimistic Dan Aykroyd interviews and a few rumors of an animated film, at least as far as anybody not enlisted in the Corps can tell.
Per Reitman, his film (which he recently approached his dad about doing) will serve as a delayed-sequel to the first two films in the franchise, finally giving fans the resolution to, we don’t know, worrying about whatever the hell Ray has been up to for the last 20 years. (Our guess: Skull huntin’.) “I’ve always thought of myself as the first Ghostbusters fan,” Reitman told EW. “When I was a 6-year-old visiting the set. I wanted to make a movie for all the other fans. This is the next chapter in the original franchise. It is not a reboot. What happened in the ’80s happened in the ’80s, and this is set in the present day.”
Despite that candor, though, Reitman is keeping most details about his new project extremely quiet, presumably because there’s nothing American internet culture loves more than not shutting the fuck up about Ghostbusters, ever, and he’s trying to forestall these particular headaches as long as he possibly can. Questions the Labor Day director wisely failed to address at this early stage included: What’s it about? How will it address the 2016 film? Will the old (non-Harold Ramis) Ghostbusters be in it? Will the new old Ghostbusters in it? What about the Real Ghostbusters? Extreme Ghostbusters? Whither Onionhead, Jason? Whither Onionhead?
Here’s a fun fact, though: If Reitman’s film—which his dad is producing—actually hits its proposed Summer 2020 release date, it’ll be the shortest gap the series has ever had between in films, including the five-year span stretching between Ghostbusters in 1984 and its shrug-inducing sequel in 1989. Hollywood has never been hungrier for Ghostbusters movies, apparently, for some reason, at least according to the people making the damn things. Who knew?