Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire hits theaters next month, marking what will undoubtedly be the latest chapter in Hollywood not understanding what makes an IP interesting, and instead just opting to use it as set dressing for a generic blockbuster with smatterings of fan service.
That was certainly the case for Frozen Empire‘s predecessor, Ghostbusters: Afterlife, a film that so desperately leaned on its status as a Ghostbusters franchise entry that it wound up looking completely lost whenever it tried to engage with itself outside of a Stay Puft cameo or proton pack VFX.
But even though the van is hurtling straight for a chasm, Frozen Empire will not be taking its foot off of this particular stroke of gas. In a recent interview with Total Film, director Gil Kenan revealed that this was going to be a “scary” Ghostbusters movie, insofar as a Ghostbusters movie can be scary, presumably. (Frozen Empire doesn’t yet have an MPAA rating.)
This is a scary Ghostbusters movie, I set out to go for the thrills. As a big-screen experience, I think it’s going to play like a scary, funny movie. The secret is that the scarier a scene is, the funnier the next joke is going to play. That’s the way that the pendulum swings with tone. Twisting that lever to make sure that the scares land is a way of making sure that the jokes are funnier.
Beyond the fact that that’s a wildly ineffective way to describe the tension-centric relationship between comedy and horror, to say nothing of just how little relative control one can have when it comes to comedy, going about a Ghostbusters film as a big-screen blockbuster epic is not only a tired approach on its own, but completely misunderstands what made the other Ghostbusters films (i.e. the original, the 2016 reboot, and, to a slightly lesser extent, Ghostbusters II) work as well as they did.
It’s true that, on some level, a Ghostbusters film needs to be cinematic to accommodate for the larger confrontations that the team finds themselves in, but they are, first and foremost, highly stylized workplace comedies that have a firm grasp on how each line should be delivered and the smartly abrupt way that they flow from scene to scene.
That’s not to say that a Ghostbusters movie can only work in that context, but it’s certainly the only context that they’ve worked in up to this point, and I get the distinct impression that doubling down on the blockbuster route isn’t the solution here. I hope I’m wrong.
(featured image: Jaap Buitendijk/Sony Pictures)
