If Ghostbusters 4 is to happen as a follow-up to Ghostbusters: Afterlife, it has to overcome a big problem related to its villains and the whole purpose of the title team. Among the current dominating trends in the entertainment industry are reboots, and not even a franchise like Ghostbusters was safe, and it went through two different ones. The first one happened in 2016 with Paul Feig as director, but after its failure, the franchise was rebooted again with Jason Reitman’s Ghostbusters: Afterlife, finally released in 2021 after a couple of delays.
Set 30 years after the events of Ivan Reitman’s Ghostbusters II, Ghostbusters: Afterlife follows single mother Callie (Carrie Coon) and her children Trevor (Finn Wolfhard) and Phoebe (Mckenna Grace), who after being evicted from their home, are forced to move to a farm located in Summerville, Oklahoma, which Callie inherited from her late father – original Ghostbuster, Egon Spengler. When the town experiences a series of unexplained earthquakes and other unusual activities, Trevor and Phoebe discover their family’s link to the original Ghostbusters team and decide to continue their legacy by taking care of what’s messing with Summerville. With the help of the old Ghostbusters’ equipment, their new friends Podcast (Logan Kim) and Lucky (Celeste O’Connor), and local seismologist Mr. Grooberson (Paul Rudd), Phoebe and Trevor discover a huge threat that is also connected to the original team.
The big villain in Ghostbusters: Afterlife turned out to be Gozer (now played by Olivia Wilde), just like in the first movie, and with it came its minions Vinz Clortho the Keymaster and Zuul the Gatekeeper. Ghostbusters: Afterlife also brought new creatures, as are Muncher and the Mini-Pufts, but they were all defeated in the end when the surviving members of the original Ghostbusters team arrived to help the new team and Egon’s ghost appeared to help as well, trapping Gozer and company. Before Gozer’s return, there hadn’t been any ghost sightings in decades, and with Gozer’s defeat, all ghosts returned to the underworld, so the world is ghost-free again – so what would be the trigger in Ghostbusters 4?
Ghostbusters 4 wouldn’t have ghosts to justify its storyline, and the writers would have to come up with a believable (in the context of the Ghostbusters universe, that is) trigger for a new ghost problem that Phoebe and company can take care of. A way around this can be through Ghostbusters: Afterlife’s post-credits scene, where the warning lights of the ecto-containment unit at the original Ghostbusters headquarters started to blink, implying that a major ghost disaster could happen soon. However, the Ghostbusters headquarters are in New York and the new, younger team is in Summerville, and it’s unlikely that the ghosts unleashed from the ecto-containment will go that far. The biggest challenge for a potential Ghostbusters 4, then, would be finding a way to bring ghosts back to justify a new storyline without it feeling forced.
Although Ghostbusters: Afterlife received mixed reviews and has performed well on the box office, there’s no word on a sequel yet, and even though it would be exciting and interesting to see how young characters like Phoebe and Trevor will carry on with the heavy legacy of the Ghostbusters, there surely are many details to sort out before Reitman and company move forward with a fourth movie.