Ghostbusters director Jason Reitman meticulously mimicked details of original for follow-up teaser

As a Ghostbusters follow-up comes down the pike from the original director’s son, there have been plenty of questions surrounding the merits of hiring nepotistically simply for the DNA of the director to be closest to the original (and also the decision to, seemingly, discard the 2016 reboot). Now, thanks to a podcast interview that goes into detail on the creation of the single teaser that’s been released for the film, fans now have reason to believe that Jason Reitman won’t just be replacing his father, Ivan, but replicating his work with almost religious reverence.

Speaking on Bill Burr’s Monday Morning Podcast, Reitman explained how much he truly took from the first film in order to make the 47-second teaser.

“We went back to the work files for the sound of the proton pack. And we went back to the stems of Elmer Bernstein’s score,” the director said. “Just for where it says, in the teaser, ‘Summer 2020,’ we went back and found the original physical vinyl letters they used to create the Ghostbusters poster in 1984. Rescanned them and then our titles guys reprinted them. We filmed the titles. Not like in a computer. We shot physical titles with a light and smoke effect, because that’s how they would have done it back in the day.”

“We are, in every way, trying to go back to the original technique and hand the movie back to the fans," the director said. Reitman also explained that instead of doing multiple versions of the film for the studio in the form of rewrites, they greenlit his first draft and sent him to film the movie.

“My presumption was it was gonna be like any studio film that I’d heard about, where they do years of rewrites and they grind it into the ground and it never happens. I was fully prepared for this year to be a year of taking a little time off and doing rewrites on Ghostbusters, and instead the studio read the first draft and said, ‘Yeah, go make it.’”

It’ll also be Reitman’s first time working with visual effect setpieces and a visual effects house to create ghosts and other supernatural accoutrements, but as long as he remains hardcore faithful to the original, he’ll have a blueprint to work from.

The new Ghostbusters should look an awful lot like the first Ghostbusters when it hits theaters in the summer of 2020.