Development history
Ghostbusters 3 had been a steady source of on-again, off-again rumors since at least 1997, when Ramis and Aykroyd were working on the Hellbent concept. The original-cast-plus-trainees premise was in place even then, and an early draft was reportedly written with Chris Farley in mind. Over the years, a long list of performers was rumored as the younger leads, including Ben Stiller, Will Smith, Chris Rock, and Conan O'Brien.
Whether Bill Murray would return was a persistent question. Murray had made his unhappy experience on Ghostbusters II well known, and a long-standing rift with Ramis went unresolved. At one point the word was that Murray had agreed to appear only if his character died early and returned as a ghost. The project came close enough to being real that it appeared as a completed credit in Aykroyd's filmography on a handful of Universal home-video releases, including 1941, the original Collector's Edition of The Blues Brothers, and Blues Brothers 2000.
In 1999, Aykroyd said the screenplay had been budgeted by Columbia at roughly $150 million, a prohibitive figure for the studio at the time. He asked to take the script to other studios, but Sony declined to license the franchise rights elsewhere, and the project was considered dead.
In 2005, while promoting The Ice Harvest, Ramis described the Hellbent screenplay in more detail and reiterated interest in casting Stiller and Farley. He suggested two versions may have existed, one in which the team mourns Venkman's death and another with the character fully present.
In 2008, Aykroyd said Sony was developing Ghostbusters III: Hellbent as a potential all-CGI movie, noting he could realize his ideas for far less money that way. Around the same time he described the Hell-side-of-Manhattan plot in interviews while indicating Murray's full involvement.
The video game as "the third movie"
In 2009, Ghostbusters: The Video Game reunited all four main actors in a story revised by Aykroyd and Ramis, with only Sigourney Weaver and Rick Moranis opting out. Aykroyd said the game was not directly based on Hellbent but contained much of the same material, and went on record calling it "essentially the third movie." For many fans the game became the closest thing to a canonical continuation of the original story that the era produced.
The Eisenberg and Stupnitsky era
As interest renewed, Sony assigned Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky, writers on Year One and the US version of The Office, to develop a new screenplay. In March 2009 Sony announced it was actively developing Ghostbusters 3 as a theatrical sequel. Aykroyd said the writers had studied the video game so the script could account for its plot developments. Etan Cohen, a writer on Men in Black 3 and Tropic Thunder, was later brought on for a second draft. Reported story elements from this period included a "post-2012 cataclysm" backdrop and new equipment ideas such as a "psychotron" and a dimension-hopping device called a "neuron splitter."
By October 2010 a first draft had been submitted to Sony and reportedly approved, with Aykroyd, Ramis, and Ivan Reitman said to be on board and the draft on its way to Murray. Tentative plans floated a late-2010 or early-2011 shoot for a 2012 release. Casting rumors from this stretch named Bill Hader, Anna Faris, Eliza Dushku, Alyssa Milano, and Matthew Gray Gubler, among others. The status of Rick Moranis was repeatedly raised; Moranis had said as early as 2005 that he had no interest in another Ghostbusters film, did not return for the video game, and had been semi-retired for years.
Throughout, Murray remained the central obstacle. He spoke skeptically about the writers and the project in the press, telling Howard Stern there was a script he had not read and saying, "Ivan wants to make it and I owe him." In February 2012, during a live chat with Empire, Aykroyd said the script still needed work because they would not release a film that was less than perfect, and addressed the possibility of a Moranis return if the script came together. Speaking to The Telegraph soon after, Aykroyd was more downbeat, saying it was a near certainty that Murray would not do the movie, even as the studio, Reitman, and Ramis still believed there was a way forward. His summary at the time: "We're not going to do a movie that exploits the franchise. The script has to be perfect. I'm the cheerleader, but I'm only one voice in the matter."
What actually happened
The Hellbent sequel never went into production. Harold Ramis died in 2014, and the version of Ghostbusters 3 that fans had tracked for nearly twenty years was never filmed.
The original 1984 continuity was eventually continued, but by a different generation of filmmakers. Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021), directed by Ivan Reitman's son Jason Reitman, picked up the original timeline a generation later, and Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire (2024) followed it. Separately, the 2016 reboot Ghostbusters: Answer the Call told an unrelated, self-contained story. None of these is the long-rumored Hellbent, but Afterlife is the film that finally answered the question of what came next for the original Ghostbusters.
See also
References
- Dan Aykroyd, Harold Ramis, Bill Murray, Sigourney Weaver, and Ernie Hudson, interviews and press remarks on the development of a third Ghostbusters film, 1999 to 2012 (sources include IGN, In Focus, MTV, Entertainment Weekly, GQ, The Howard Stern Show, Empire, and The Telegraph).
- ABC News, "Men in Black 3 Writer Etan Cohen Rewriting Ghostbusters 3" (2012).
