Fan-favourite characters meet new blood in a chilling adventure that’s dripping with nostalgia
In 1984, Peter Venkman (Bill Murray), Ray Stantz (Dan Aykroyd), Egon Spengler (Harold Ramis), and Winston Zeddemore (Ernie Hudson) donned their uniforms and fired up their proton packs in Ghostbusters. Combining comedy with special effects wizardry, Ghostbusters was unlike anything audiences had seen at the time. It spawned three further films, animated series, video games, and comics, building up a mythology and gaining a cult following. The franchise celebrates its 40th anniversary with Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, a nostalgia-packed film that pits our heroes against their most formidable foe yet.
Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire is set three years after the events of Ghostbusters: Afterlife. The latter was a legacy sequel, functioning as the third entry in the franchise’s main continuity but the fourth Ghostbusters movie overall (including a 2016 reboot). Callie Spengler (Carrie Coon), her boyfriend Gary Grooberson (Paul Rudd), her kids Phoebe (Mckenna Grace) and Trevor (Finn Wolfhard), and their friends Lucky (Celeste O’Connor) and Podcast (Logan Kim) return from Afterlife, in which Phoebe discovered that her late grandfather was Egon. The Spenglers have relocated from Summerville, Oklahoma, to New York City, the Ghostbusters’ original base of operations.
Nadeem Razmaadi (Kumail Nanjiani) brings a mysterious bronze orb to Ray, who is studying cursed and haunted artefacts. With the help of library researcher Dr Hubert Wartzki (Patton Oswalt), Ray and Podcast learn the orb contains Garraka, an ancient demonic entity who will freeze the world if he is not stopped. The Ghostbusters, both old and new, must unite against this destructive force. Also reprising their roles from the original Ghostbusters movie are Annie Potts as Janine Melnitz, the team’s secretary-turned-Ghostbuster herself, and William Atherton as Walter Peck, the former Environmental Protection Agency inspector and now New York City mayor who is hellbent on shutting down the Ghostbusters.
Frozen Empire celebrates and emphasises the theme of homecoming. A crucial part of the Ghostbusters iconography is the firehouse, Hook & Ladder Company 8, the team’s base of operations. In Afterlife, it is mentioned that it has since become a Starbucks. In Frozen Empire, the firehouse is reclaimed as the Ghostbusters’ home. Director and co-writer Gil Kenan tells The Wrap that Frozen Empire explores “that [work-life] balance or imbalance of what it’s like to be a ghost-busting family living in this iconic building that’s not designed to sustain a life of… a modern and dynamic family”. Phoebe’s tumultuous relationship with her mother and would-be stepfather echoes the instability in the spectral world — the family is at risk of collapsing, just like the building that they inhabit.
Ghostbusters is a quintessential New York movie; in fact, the firehouse is a real building in the Tribeca neighbourhood of Manhattan that many Ghostbusters fans make a pilgrimage to. So, it feels apt for the franchise to return there. Most of the film was shot in London, but Kenan tells Next Best Picture: “We did film some key sequences in New York City, and it was really important for me that we could root the story in the city where it takes place. There’s nothing like filming in the streets of New York, down to the pedestrians that gawk at an Ecto-1 (The Ghostbusters’ signature vehicle) flying past, turning their heads.”
Kenan takes the directorial reins from Jason Reitman, who helmed Afterlife and co-wrote both Afterlife and Frozen Empire. He is the son of the late Ivan Reitman, who co-created the Ghostbusters franchise and directed the first two movies. “Ivan set the bar very high with his Ghostbusters films,” Kenan tells Box Office Pro. “Making sure that Frozen Empire is a thrill for audiences on a large canvas is a direct nod to the templates that Ivan created with Ghostbusters in 1984 and Ghostbusters II in 1989.” Frozen Empire is dedicated to Reitman.
A big part of this movie’s appeal is the return of the surviving original actors, who have expanded roles in Frozen Empire after their appearance in Afterlife. “They really love their characters and each other, so we wrote this story with the confidence that they would want to go there. If we did right by their characters on the page, they would go along for the ride,” Kenan says.
“With Bill, Danny, and Annie — it’s closer than friendship. It’s like we’ve been to war together. So, it was very special. I always get a little emotional when I see them,” Hudson tells Empire about reuniting with his castmates. He also tells Blavity that he thinks Frozen Empire is “really as close to the first couple of movies as anything we’ve done”.
Describing Afterlife as “sort of a re-awakening, just a rediscovery of Ghostbusters and the history,” Hudson calls Frozen Empire “full-out Ghostbusters” — in other words, a nostalgia trip for those who love the original movie.
The Spengler family returns to the iconic New York City firehouse. When the discovery of an ancient artifact unleashes an evil force, Ghostbusters new and old must join forces.
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