Ghostbusters: Afterlife director Jason Reitman is getting roasted on Twitter for rebooting his father Ivan Reitman's series. Jason Reitman first broke onto the scene with his directorial debut, the anti-tobacco satire Thank You for Smoking, in 2005. Since then, he has enjoyed a fruitful creative partnership with Diablo Cody, directing three films written by the Oscar-winning screenwriter in Juno, Young Adult, and Tully. Now, Reitman will be rebooting the franchise that his father originated in 1984.
The revival film officially subtitled Afterlife acts as a direct sequel to the original 1984 film and the oft-forgotten follow-up from 1989, directed by Reitman's father, who now serves as a producer on his son's movie. Ghostbusters: Afterlife follows a single mother (Carrie Coon) and her two children (Finn Wolfhard and Mckenna Grace) who move into a farmhouse in Oklahoma left to her by her late father, Egon Spengler (Harold Ramis). They soon discover the Ghostbuster's old equipment left on the premises, like the iconic Ecto-1, which they must use to defend the town from paranormal threats.
Now, the Ghostbusters: Afterlife director is getting roasted on Twitter for rebooting his father's franchise. The tweets are in response to a profile of Jason Reitman by Entertainment Insider, which claims that the director "used his complicated relationship with his father take on the franchise he's avoided his whole life." Many of the tweets claim the filmmaker needs therapy and was only hired because of nepotism. Read a few of them below:
Ghostbusters: Afterlife is certainly a deviation from Reitman's past work, who has largely stayed away from blockbuster films and opted for more subdued character-focused comedy-dramas, which his 2009 film Up in the Air is a prime example of. After collaborating with Michael Bay on the Transformers franchise by punching up the dialogue in the Dark of the Moon and Age of Extinction scripts (which he wasn't credited for), Reitman decided to continue deviating from his established course by finally following in his father's footsteps by directing a Ghostbusters movie. However, there seems to be a vocal faction who would have preferred he stayed away from the franchise altogether.
How Reitman's reboot fares remains to be seen, but based on early reviews, critics seem split on how the film leans on nostalgia too heavily with the inclusion of Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Ernie Hudson, Sigourney Weaver, and Annie Potts who reprise their roles from the original films. Audiences will be able to make up their minds about how Jason Reitman's work compares to his father's original films when Ghostbusters: Afterlife releases in theaters on November 19.
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