Fresh rumours are hitting about trouble with the effort to bring the **Ghostbusters **back to the screen, with the latest alleged disagreement surrounding who should heft the megaphone.
The Vulture blog is hearing that Sony studio bosses and producer/director Ivan Reitman are at loggerheads over who should direct the film. Reitman has a contractual stipulation giving him (and leads Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis) control over the movie – basically, if one of them vetoes an element, they can stop the whole thing.
Reitman has been attached to direct for a while now, but it appears that Sony now wants a younger, fresher talent to handle the job, just as it did with Spider-Man and Marc Webb. It’s also worried that Reitman’s more recent films, such as My Super Ex-Girlfriend, have mostly been flops. Trouble is, the director/producer locked in his Ghostbusters contract back in the 1980s, when he’d made hugely successful comedies and could command the power he still has over the spook hunting franchise.
Vulture’s sources speculate that, with the studio eager to get the film ready for a 2011 release, and the next draft of the script due in May, the decision to green light rom-com Friends With Benefits for Reitman to handle plays into keeping the man busy while it looks elsewhere for someone to lead Ghostbusters.
According to Variety, Natalie Portman and Ashton Kutcher are signed on to Benefits, which will work from Elizabeth Meriwether’s Black List script originally titled Fkbuddies**, and finds a couple who enjoy the casual sex side of their relationship, but suddenly realise they might want more. That’ll also start shooting in May.
Given the long journey that Ghostbusters 3 has already endured to get to our screens, this sounds like just one more roadbump…