Dan Aykroyd has been involved with the Ghostbusters universe for a long time, having helped to write and act in the original, not to mention helping to produce the 2016 reboot and pop in with a cameo, plus all of the video game work and more that came in between. The newer movie hasn't been as big of a hit as some of the past stuff, and Aykroyd has been speaking out quite a bit lately about why the all-female remake didn't come together. Recently, he took to social media to clarify those statements and also explain why Ghostbusters 2 will probably not be happening. Here's what he wrote:
Paul Feig made a good movie and had a superb cast and plenty of money to do it. We just wish he had been more inclusive to the originators. It cost everyone as it is unlikely Kristen, Leslie, Melissa and Kate will ever reprise their roles as Ghostbusters which is sad.
The reason Ghostbusters 2 probably won't get off the ground, at least according to Aykyroyd, has nothing to do with the cast or the budget given by the studio. Instead, Aykroyd feels like director Paul Feig didn't really listen to input from people who were originally involved in the early movies, presumably including himself. Everyone is being punished for those decisions, including the cast and the audience, who now won't be able to see what else those ladies could do if they had more ghosts to fight.
This is in contrast to the comments Dan Aykroyd made the other day, in which he blasted the Ghostbusters reboot director for making poor decisions while filming, leading to a bloated budget. At that time, he wasn't comfortable calling out Paul Feig, although in his latest comments on Facebook he does actually say Paul Feig and does say it was decisions by the director that ultimately led to the movie being more poorly received than it could have been, which is why we won't get a sequel.
A lot of people weren't really sold on the idea of a reboot--much less a female reboot--before the film came out. Paul Feig's Ghostbusters does have its moments, including a really perfect opening sequence and plenty of people, Dan Aykroyd included, liked the movie when they saw it. Paul Feig has even said that he really loved the Internet before making Ghostbusters but that people were so awful to him during the making of that movie that it's been hard for him to come back from that. Despite dealing with all of this behind-the-scenes stuff, the movie still made $229 million at the box office, and if it could have been done with a smaller overall budget, perhaps a sequel would still be in the cards for the female remake. Regardless, since Hollywood needs to make money on projects in order to justify sequels, it's unlikely that we'll see Ghostbusters 2 anytime soon. And that, according to Dan Aykroyd, could have have happened if the original creators had been asked for input more often.
