Who ya gonna call? Well actually now we know who will be ready to believe you.
Paul Feig, who directed Bridesmaids and The Heat, and Sony’s choice to spearhead the Ghostbusters reboot to the big screen, revealed today on Twitter who will be suiting up and armed with proton packs in the film.
— Paul Feig (@paulfeig) January 27, 2015
Not too much of a surpise here that Melissa McCarthy and Kristen Wiig are on board (both are solid memebrs of Feig’s trusted stable of actors and Bridesmaids alum), but rounding out the foursome are current Saturday Night Live cast members Kate McKinnon and Leslie Jones.
Feig has also enlisted Katie Dippold, who penned his female buddy cop comedy The Heat starring McCarthy and Sandra Bullock, to co-write the paranormal screenplay.
Feig explained to Entertainment Weekly last October his thought process regarding rebooting the series with a female team:
I love the first one so much I don’t want to do anything to ruin the memory of that. So it just felt like, let’s just restart it because then we can have new dynamics. I want the technology to be even cooler. I want it to be really scary, and I want it to happen in our world today that hasn’t gone through it so it’s like, oh my God what’s going on?
I just find funny women so great. For me it’s just more of a no-brainer. I just go, what would make me excited to do it? I go: four female Ghostbusters to me is really fun. I want to see that dynamic. I want to see that energy and that type of comedy and them going up against these ghosts and going up against human detractors and rivals and that kind of thing.
If we just flop four women into the exact same personalities and roles as original, then that’s lazy filmmaking on my behalf, and who wants to see that? I don’t want to do a shot by shot update of a movie that existed. It’s the difficult thing about remaking a great movie. So that’s why we’re not remaking a great movie. We’re doing our take on it.
Original Ghostbusters director Ivan Reitman will return as a producer, bowing out to helm the film following years of script re-writes, non-commitment to from Bill Murray to reprise his role as Peter Venkman and finally the death of Harold Ramis. Once Feig was selected, a reboot of the series was set with (presumably) all-female leads.
Ghostbusters will hit theaters July 22, 2016.
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