Next year, a new Ghostbusters film is set to be released in order to help renew this popular franchise but it does come with a new look. The original 1984 film was dominated by an all male cast, however this film instead is set to have four female protagonists and no leading men. Automatically after hearing this news, I wanted to compare the new cast to the old cast and draw upon the distinctive similarities and differences between the two different groups.
The 1984 cast originated mostly from Saturday Night Live and Second City TV during the 1970s and were previous collaborators with each other, prior to the making of Ghostbusters. For example, Dan Aykroyd and Bill Murray worked together on Saturday Night Live. This is arguably the same for the new cast as three of its members are also from Saturday Night Live (Kirsten Wiig, Leslie Jones and Kate McKinnon).
The original 1984 film also saw Harold Ramis starring with Murray, who together, collaborated on a variety of comedic commercial hits, which include Groundhog Day and Caddyshack. The same could be said for director of the reboot, Paul Feig, who has previously successfully collaborated with McCarthy and Wiig on hit comedy films such as Bridesmaids and The Heat.
The main difference is the gender swap with Feig intentionally trying to challenge the traditional stereotypes/conventions of the original film. By bringing in an all-female cast, Feig removes the masculine influence when referencing heroic characters in addition to empowering the female character to greater cinematic heights.
Therefore Ghostbusters 2016 has successfully mixed the two elements with one another to construct an end product, which strongly ties back to the collaborative links of the original as well as explore new ideas of innovation. However time will tell whether the audience and fans will warm up the same way to Feig’s cast as the did with the original cast of Bill Murray, Dan Ackroyd and Harold Ramis.
#Peace.Love.Ghostbusters
