Life After Ghostbusters II

It was, of course, the case that Ghostbusters II, while a big hit by almost any conventional measure (a near $300 million blockbuster domestically when we adjust its gross for February 2024 prices, which made it the fifth-biggest hit of the booming summer of 1989), was received as a big disappointment in 1989 (following up as it did the Avengers-caliber blockbuster that was the first Ghostbusters, a $700 million+ hit in today's terms).

Considering that movie I am struck by how the careers of many of those involved were on a downward trajectory afterward with respect to success in major feature film, with Ivan Reitman an obvious case. Besides having the Ghostbusters movies, in the '80s he scored big with Stripes, and Twins. The early '90s were not bad for him, with Kindergarten Cop, and Dave, reasonably well-received, but not on par with his prior hits, while Reitman's reteaming with Danny DeVito and that slapfight promoter who keeps dropping at every opportunity mention that he was once "governor of California" (1994's Junior) was received as a disappointment. Subsequently Reitman's remake of the French comedy Les Compères, which bringing together Robin Williams and Billy Crystal at the height of their careers, its Nastassja Kinski comeback hype, and June release date, was supposed to be the big summer comedy of 1997 . . . but wasn't. His next would-be "big comedy of the summer" Six Days, Seven Nights (which had Harrison Ford playing off of his Indiana Jones image) did not do much better than the preceding two movies, and his last would-be big summer comedy, My Super Ex-Girlfriend, pretty much proved the end of the line for Reitman as a maker of big studio comedies, with just a couple more lower-profile feature films following over the next eight years.*

As it went for Reitman, so did it go with much of the cast, particularly those members of the actual Ghostbusters team whose careers had been most flourishing in the '80s. Bill Murray, to whom the '80s had been very good outside the franchise (he also had Caddyshack, Reitman's Stripes, Tootsie, Scrooged), saw things go south for him in much the same way. If in the early '90s he still had What About Bob? and Groundhog Day he seems to have found hits increasingly elusive, especially in those films where he was actually in the lead on screen rather than making cameos, or just lending his voice (certainly to go by the responses to Larger Than Life and The Man Who Knew Too Little). Apart from his role as Bosley in the McG-directed Charlie's Angels apart (which he did not even reprise in the 2003 sequel, that job taken over by Bernie Mac), and his voice role in the two Garfield films from the early part of the century, he would seem to have remained prominent mainly as a regular in the films of Wes Anderson and like directors--critical darling's films that get glowing reviews and win prizes, but generally do not become big box office hits, his days as a head-liner behind him.** Meanwhile Dan Aykroyd's post-Ghostbusters II career, as judged by that standard, makes Murray's look enviable.

Of course, even with the second film's perceived underperformance, and these careers going south, the studio (Columbia/Sony) still wanted a third movie. Going by what has been reported about the efforts to make that movie it seems that legalities, personalities and the like played their part in keeping the project in "development hell." Still, I also imagine that had the careers involved been doing better there would have been a greater push to get another movie done sooner--and that we started getting more Ghostbusters this past decade has been a reminder of how the franchise-addiction Hollywood was already displaying in the 1980s has got worse, the Suits ever less willing to let any possibility go. (Which is how the aforementioned slapfight promoter got to be in Terminator 6.)

* After My Super Ex-Girlfriend (which also seems to have been a turning point of sorts for its stars Luke Wilson and Uma Thurman) there was just No Strings Attached (2011), and the sports drama Draft Day (2014), though Reitman seems to have continued racking up producer credits on major films he did not direct (like 2007's Disturbia, 2009's I Love You, Man, his son Jason Reitman's 2009 Up in the Air, the 2017 Baywatch movie, and the three Ghostbusters movies of the past decade).
** Murray's credits in Anderson's films include Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, The Darjeeling Limited, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Moonrise Kingdom, The Grand Budapest Hotel, The Isle of Dogs (another voice role) and The French Dispatch--nearly every one of the lot. Murray has also been in Jim Jarmusch's Broken Flowers and two Sofia Coppola movies, namely Lost in Translation and On the Rocks.