The Spooky 'Stranger Things'-Esque First Trailer for 'Ghostbusters: Afterlife' Is Here
This time, it swaps New York for Oklahoma and grown men and women for children — and it stars Paul Rudd.
UPDATE, APRIL 4: Due to concerns around the coronavirus, Sony has announced that Ghostbusters: Afterlife will no longer release on its initially scheduled date of Thursday, July 2, 2020, with the film now hitting cinemas on March 25, 2021.
To find out more about the status of COVID-19 in Australia and how to protect yourself, head to the Australian Government Department of Health's website.
There's something strange in the town of Summerville and a group of kids are calling upon themselves to bust it. That's the premise of Ghostbusters: Afterlife, which swaps New York for Oklahoma and grown men (and women) for children — and jumps firmly on the Stranger Things-led 80s nostalgia bandwagon.
Whether siblings Phoebe (Annabelle Comes Home's McKenna Grace) and Trevor (Stranger Things' Finn Wolfhard) are seeing things runnin' through their heads or they'll catch an invisible man sleepin' in their beds is yet to be seen, but the film's first trailer does lay out the basics of this threequel's plot. The central duo has moved to the isolated locale with their mother (Widows' Carrie Coon), and into a rundown old house they've inherited from their grandfather. It's filled with ghost traps, containers of spores, mould and fungus, beige jumpsuits emblazoned with the name 'Spengler' and a very familiar car — which might come in handy when the ground starts shaking for no reason and a mysterious green light starts glowing.
Paul Rudd also stars as teacher Mr Grooberson, who schools the kids in Ghostbusters lore — because this is a direct sequel to the original 1984 Ghostbusters and its 1989 follow-up Ghostbusters II. In the just-dropped sneak peek, the original characters appear in news footage, and Bill Murray's voice is heard; however, Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Ernie Hudson, Sigourney Weaver and Annie Potts are all set to reprise their roles in the film. (Harold Ramis, aka Spengler, passed away in 2014).
Because bustin' makes everyone feel good, the Afterlife trailer is filled with other nods to the first two films, with writer/director Jason Reitman (Tully, The Front Runner) making both obvious and subtle references to the movies originally directed by his dad Ivan Reitman.
Still, let's not forget that a great recent Ghostbusters film already exists, thanks to Paul Feig's wrongly maligned all-female version from 2016 — although Afterlife seems to be glossing over that.
Check out the trailer below:
After being delayed from its original release date of July 2, 2020, Ghostbusters: Afterlife will now open in Australian cinemas on March 25, 2021.
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