The original Ghostbusters is one of the best comedies to come from the 1980s. It was such a creative idea that is elevated with clever and dry humor with an amazing cast. When the sequel came along, it was criticized for being too similar to the first one, which kind of showed that the first movie just worked as its own thing and did not have the potential to become a franchise. In 2016, they attempted to remake the original, but failed to capture the charm and wit of that movie.
Now with this new movie, they scrapped any plans that they had for sequels to the 2016 movie in favor of a third installment to the first two movies, but now with a younger and more diverse cast, while also bringing back a lot of the original cast. The movie does do a great job of setting up this new team and has that Spielberg-like storytelling, the problem comes from the movie being too derivative of the first movie. Just like with Ghostbusters II, the movie hits the exact same story beats as the original instead of doing its own thing. Although this one does come off as more of a tribute. The movie is still solid though, it has that dry humor and there are moments in the movie that try to be somewhat scary. Not to mention how there’s times where they use practical effects for the ghosts, which is always great to see. I don’t know if they’ll end up continuing the series after this, but I would love to see them actually go on to create new and interesting ideas.