Murray famously declined to participate in another “Ghostbusters” movie for years, and his deal with the studio prevented the project from going forward without his consent, until he relinquished with a cameo in the all-female 2016 reboot. Now, director Jason Reitman — whose father, Ivan Reitman, directed the original — is set to direct a secretive “Ghostbusters” project scheduled for release next year, and Murray said in an interview from Cannes that he would have no problem participating in it.
“This franchise paid for my son’s college,” he said, as he sipped on coffee at the Carlton Hotel. “We made this thing. We are the caretakers of it. It’s a great thing and it was a really fun movie to make. It’s a real movie with some really funny stuff in it.” However, he added that his connection to the franchise was determined by his relationship to the actors in the original. “They’re wonderful people,” he said. “Danny [Ackroyd], Ernie [Hudson], Harold [Ramis], Rick Moranis, Annie Potts — they’re some of the coolest people and they had real careers. They treat people well. They really understand what it is to be a movie actor. It’s a complete collaboration.”
He drew a distinction between those personal connotations and the commercial history of the franchise. “The relationship you have with those people as collaborators is not necessarily the relationship I have with Sony,” he said. “For years, they said, ‘We can’t make another “Ghostbusters” because Bill Murray won’t change the deal he made in 1984.’ Well, no, I never did. And you know what? They made the movie. You’re the new guys, I’m the old guy. It was good enough for the other people so it’s going to have to be good enough for you.”
He chose to appear in the Paul Feig-directed “Ghostbusters” in 2016, he added, because of his friendship with co-stars Kate McKinnon and Melissa McCarthy, who share the actor’s roots in “Saturday Night Live” and made a similar jump to studio projects. “I was in that movie just because they asked me, and I knew if I said no, I was saying I didn’t support that movie,” he said. “I felt like, OK, I’m going to support them because I support them as people. So I did that one and I would do this next one.”
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