Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire (2024)

[The Joker]

Someone needs to give their gaydar a rest for once. Sounds like the same type of person who would blog about the notion that Bucky Barnes and Steve Rogers are definitely in love with one another. I mean, one of Captain America's main objectives was driven by Bucky in the MCU. By trying to find and save him. Which is telling, right? Obviously they are gay! A platonic relationship that is affectionate, empathetic, but not sexual, simply doesn't and shouldn't exist in todays world. Is this critic associated with slate.com by any chance?

Plus, let's get real. If this movie actually took the step of literally taking the cuties route with no F's given, it's RT. That would have resulted in automatically alleviating the severe cases of red*ss among critics about the 2016 flick getting canned, and the critic score would undoubtedly be much higher, don'tcha think? Why would they hold back? They love that underage stuff. Mainstream audiences? Yeah, not so much, and for good reason. The dichotomy between the scores is more indicative to me that most people are simply not seeing what this critic is apparently seeing as an absolute. Maybe a lot of us watched a edited cut? Nah, probably not.

On the topic that the original Ghostbusters should have been focused upon in a new set of films, that we can agree on. It's one of those situations where you just know there was much more to explore with the original cast, but the years of developmental hell, Bill Murray, and unfortunately, Harold Ramis passing away really took the oomph away from what that could have been like. The fact that Sony willed the 2016 crap into existence really did a lot of damage to the overall brand. Hell, I have a Ghostbusters logo t-shirt, and stopped wearing it because I literally didn't want to give anyone the notion that I was a fan of what was then the 'current' ill-conceived iteration. Also, as I've stated before, I'm thankful for "GB Afterlife", as in no world would I want what we got in 2016 to be the ultimate bookend with "Ghostbusters" in the title. If "Afterlife" succeeded in any way by making the 2016 failure a distant memory for the new generation, sweeping it right into the dust bin of history, in addition to getting the bad taste out of everyone's mouth of which the franchise was left in, then, yes, it ultimately did it's job.

[The Joker]

What I am about to write doesn't really have anything to do with "GB Frozen Empire", but I don't think we have a general discussion Ghostbusters thread, so I'll just place it here.

Anyways, finally got the opportunity to check out the "Preview Cut" for GB1, and what an interesting experience this was! It's a very raw cut for sure, with absolutely no music whatsoever, and some scenes being absolutely silent (the montage sequence for example), along with the ghosts being somewhat omitted (although some are occasionally achieved via storyboard-like animation) due to the SFX not being completed (unless it's involving terror dog puppet work and many of the ghost scenes are in black and white, BTW), but what is here is deleted scenes, alternate takes, expanded scenes (even if it's ever so slight), different line deliveries, ect ect.

For someone who pretty much knows GB1 forwards and backwards, this raw "Preview Cut" is definitely something else, and a gem to behold to be perfectly honest. Hopefully this gets added to a future blu ray release outside of the pricey Ultimate 4K Collection set a few years back, cause this really and truly deserves to be seen by more Ghostbusters fans. If purely for the experience of seeing GB1 in such a raw 'workprint' like format with all the neat differentiating scenes and dialogue.