If you have a steel-trap memory, you remember at one point Phil Lord and Chris Miller were rumored to be directing an early version of “Ghostbusters 3” circa 2014. And in a recent Happy. Sad. Confused. podcast discussion, the duo admitted that those rumors were true, although they were noticeably reluctant to talk about it, seemingly because they didn’t want to reveal too much,
How far the road did they get on it? Their answer is kind of confusing, to be honest.
“We got ve— oh well, it depends. I’m looking at Chris,” Phil Lord said. “I don’t what we can or should say, but we can say we had a friend who had an idea for a ‘Ghostbusters’ thing that was great and we developed it for a little bit with Ivan [Reitman] and then we put it to the side for a bit and I don’t know if it will ever come back, but it was fun.”
Is there still room for their version of ‘Ghostbusters” to exist, even though Jason Reitman just successfully restarted the franchise?
“My understanding is that where Jason and Ivan are heading is, first things first, ‘protect the mothership,’” Lord said of the main franchise flagship film. “[Ours] was a little more sideways of that.”
The duo did confirm a lot of project, their “21 Jump Street”/”Men In Black” crossover which was real and you can read about here and their take on the TV series, “Greatest American Hero” with director Rick Famiyuwa at the helm.
“Rick had a great take on it which was the gentrification of Inglewood, he was a great lovely guy to work with,” they explained. “Not everything works out which is why we have a lot of irons in the fire.”
While Happy. Sad. Confused. ran down a lot of projects that never came to be, they did not ask about “The Flash,” which was a project Lord and Miller were involved with. Of course, they did broach the “Solo: A Star Wars Story” movie that they were notoriously and unceremoniously fired from, but there were very few revelations and mostly diplomatic talk about what they learned.
“We’ve always wanted to make projects that are, like Han, a maverick, and so that’s what we were always trying to do, that’s what we were hoping to do with those movies,” they explained. “It was funny, about [the original] ‘Star Wars,’ it’s an independent film made outside the Hollywood system. And Han is the spirit of that kind of independence and that’s why we were always inspired to work on that with everybody.”
The duo added, “The good news is, they can’t take away what you learned. We learned so much. We got to work with the greatest people, we made so many friends. We, what we call in animation, put ‘pencil miles’ under our belts and it made us better filmmakers in the long run. So, in a funny way, there’s obviously a lot of negative emotions associated with that, but the way I feel about it now, like I feel about all these projects, which is you’re just trying to become better and learn and collaborate with people and that doesn’t go away.”
You can hear the full discussion below: