Bill Murray Again Dismisses Ghostbusters 3; "It's Just A Myth," He Says

An open request to Bill Murray: Please don't ever change or become more easygoing about films you're clearly not interested in making. As a corollary to that request, please don't make it any easier to tell when you're really, truly serious.

Murray has been said to be one of the big holdouts for Ghostbusters 3, and with good reason. (It sounds like a studio nostaliga grab; Murray is by far the most vital of the original crew; many doubts about the script.) The second film sucked and there's plenty of reason to be afraid the third could be just as bad. Murray infamously called the idea of the third film his nightmare and said it's just crazy talk.

Now, while doing press for Get Low, he's gone a step beyond, saying that Ghostbusters 3 is "just a myth." Now, what he means by that is...

CinemaBlend caught Murray in the proper mood while he did press for Get Low, and in addition to the myth comment he said that the film is "like the white alligator in the sewer, you know? Who's seen it, really?" He went on to say,

It's just really the movie studio. They love the franchise, they'd just like to re-create it again. All this talk is just talk. It drives me nuts, it's just people talking...Until someone actually creates a great script it's just hogwash, it doesn't mean anything. It's interesting that people are interested in it, they'd like to see it. It was a great thing, it really was fun. Maybe it should. And if it's such a good idea, then someone will write the screenplay.

ComingSoon got some similar quotes,

...it's really the world of sequels and bringing these things back again, and then some wiseacre said, 'Hey, we got a couple of new writers who are gonna write something.' And I thought, 'Oh, well, maybe there'll be some writers' and there was always this joke, sort of a half-true, half-joke thing like, 'Well, I'll do it if you kill me off in the first reel.' That was my joke, you know? So supposedly someone was writing a script where I actually got killed in the first reel and became a ghost, which I thought, 'Well, that's kind of clever anyway.' But then these guys that were supposedly the writers that were going to do it, they wrote a film that came out and people saw the film and went... 'We're not going to do it after all, are we?' So it's just a kind of a dreamy thing.

The writers he's referencing are probably Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky, and the movie Year One, which wasn't very good at all. They've turned in a Ghostbusters 3 script and Ivan Reitman is meant to direct, but the studio reportedly wants someone else. Would they scrap the existing script, or have another writer do an extensive new pass, should a new director manage to come on board? Can the studio even get someone else? Reitman's old contract gives him a lot of power over this film, and there may be no choice about making the movie without him.

We don't know, but if nothing else perhaps the most valuable bit of actual info in these quotes from Murray is that nothing sounds particularly solid. In general, he makes the whole project sound a lot more tenuous than everyone else has made it out to be. Is that based on the script, or the involvement of Ivan Reitman?

But then Murray offered,

I actually thought the other day–it's just become so irritating–but I actually heard people like, young people that really [heard] of the movie when they were kids and I thought, 'You know, maybe I should just do it. Maybe it'd be fun to do.'