To recap, rumors of a third Ghostbusters movie have been circulating since at least 2008. Then Ivan Reitman confirmed rumors that he’d direct it, but they need Bill Murray to sign off the script before they can go ahead with it. Murray told Howard Stern a year ago that the script was on his desk, but he hadn’t got around to reading it. Then Dan Aykroyd said “Ghostbusters 3 is filming in 2012” on “The Dennis Miller Show”, which really shocked us because we had no idea someone would still give Dennis Miller a show. Then a rumor went around that Murray sent shredded bits of the script to Aykroyd and Harold Ramis with a note which read, “No one wants to pay money to see fat, old men chasing ghosts!”
Now Aykroyd tells Empire that Murray would never do such a thing:
Bill Murray is not capable of such behavior. This is simply something that would not be in his nature. We have a deep, private personal relationship that transcends business. We communicate frequently and his position on the involvement in Ghostbusters 3 has been made clear and I respect that. But Bill has too much positive estimation of my writing skills to shred the work. [Empire via ThePlaylist]
So Murray isn’t interested in playing Peter Venkman again, but he didn’t shred the script, according to Aykroyd, who also tells Empire that a different actor might be cast to play the character. A different actor. Playing Peter Venkman. This is why we can’t have nice things.
Aykroyd also said Rick Moranis should be in the movie: “If we can get the script to Ghostbusters 3 right, then it would definitely have Moranis as a major component. None of us would want to do the movie without having him as a participant.” Back in 2009, Harold Ramis told Student Life, “Rick won’t do it. Rich has retired from show business.” So you can chalk this up as yet another post about Ghostbusters 3 where everybody disagrees with everybody else about what’s actually going on. It’s as if there were some sort of pink goo running underneath the city sowing discord in the Ghostbusters cast. Maybe we could drown this project in that goo and be done with it.
[Image credit: Julia Segal]