Who ya gonna call? That’s the question the brand-new trailer for Ghostbusters: Afterlife poses. And the answer is apparently no one, because there hasn’t been a ghost sighting in over 30 years! That’s roughly the same amount of time it’s been since we had a sequel to Ghostbusters 2 (if you don’t count the video game, that is). Fans have been waiting decades to see what happened to our favorite fright-fighting foursome after they saved New York from Vigo the Carpathian on New Year’s Eve back in 1989. It looks like we’re finally going to get our chance! Check out the new trailer below:
As you can see, this new flick seems very different than the Ghostbusters movies of old. Gone is the New York City setting, replaced by a small rural town. People’s belief in the supernatural has seemed to have waned too. The Ghostbusters themselves have been all but forgotten.
But don’t worry ghost heads, there is definitely something strange in the neighborhood. An unearthly force is brewing beneath the small town and creating unnatural earthquakes. As the trailer progresses, we find out there is a connection to our beloved paranormal investigators and eliminators, after all.
It seems that with the passing of original Ghostbusters writer/actor Harold Ramis in 2014, so too did Dr. Egon Spengler move on from his mortal form. The late Egon has left an old farmhouse in the middle of nowhere to his estranged daughter (Carrie Coon), a single mother of two curious kids (Mckenna Grace and Finn Wolfhard).
The precocious pre-teens are eager to explore their new surroundings, and not only do they find a collection of spores, molds, and fungus, but they discover a pile of rusty ghostbusting equipment too!
They take one of the devices, a ghost trap, to school where their summer school teacher Mr. Grooberson (Paul Rudd) gives them a history lesson on how the Ghostbusters saved New York City back in the 1980s. No one remembers a Godzilla-sized marshmallow man stomping through Columbus Circle? How about the Statue of Liberty?
The inquisitive kids explore more and find the Ghostbuster’s main vehicle, Ecto-1, under a tarp in the barn. The little geniuses somehow manage to get the heap running again and take it for a joy ride, doing donuts in a cornfield and lighting up the town with a proton pack. If you recall, the power cells have a half-life of 5000 years!
While not exactly the tone and setting of what Ghostbuster fans are used to, the trailer is an exciting change of pace. The new characters are intriguing and there’s enough hints of what’s to come just out of frame. The town itself is called Summerville, a possible nod to the ancient Sumarians who worshipped Gozer. The source of the earthquakes is an abandoned mine owned by the Shandor Mining Co. Is this where Ivo Shandor got the materials to build 550 Central Park West from the original movie? And who’s been maintaining the containment unit filled with all the spooks the Ghostbusters caught over the years?
With so many questions left unanswered, you can mark us down as eagerly enthusiastic for the long in-development third Ghostbusters movie (not forgetting the out-of-continuity 2016 reboot). Ghostbusters: Afterlife arrives in theaters next summer on July 10, 2020. The movie is co-written and directed by Jason Reitman (son of original Ghostbusters director Ivan Reitman) and stars Carrie Coon, Paul Rudd, Mckenna Grace, Finn Wolfhard, Ernie Hudson, Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Annie Potts, and Sigourney Weaver.