Jason Reitman has unearthed lost footage from the original Ghostbusters

Last Updated on July 30, 2021

So this is the surprise Jason Reitman said he was getting ready to show to fans at the Ghostbusters Fan Fest in Los Angeles this past weekend. Working with Sony as he prepares to go into production on his own GHOSTBUSTERS film, Reitman asked the studio if he could look through the dailies for the original GHOSTBUSTERS, which was directed by his father Ivan Reitman (as was GHOSTBUSTERS II)… and while going through this old footage, he made an "extraordinary" discovery. He told the audience at the Fan Fest,

…we found (the dailies). They were in a mine in Kansas, and we shipped the boxes to Burbank. And we’ve been going through the footage for reasons I cannot tell you, but along the way we found some really cool stuff."

Reitman, joined on the stage by his father, then offered a sample of that cool, extraordinary stuff – as Slash Film describes it, it was "alternate takes, outtakes and other never-before-seen" GHOSTBUSTERS footage that has been sitting in storage since 1984.

Slash Film has video of the presentation, but the footage was just shown on a couple screens on stage, so it can only be seen from a distance, with the sound coming through the speakers at the event.

While it's great that long-lost footage has been located, what adds a whole other level of intrigue to this situation is Reitman's comment that he can't tell us right now why he has been going through that footage. That seems to indicate that it could somehow be important to what he's doing with his own GHOSTBUSTERS movie.

Reitman's GHOSTBUSTERS, which he has written with Gil Kenan, is a follow-up to his father's movies that is set to star Carrie Coon, Finn Wolfhard, and Mckenna Grace as 

a family who moves back home to a small town. While there, they begin to learn more about who they are and the secrets of the town itself.

Sigourney Weaver has said that she'll be playing her GHOSTBUSTERS / GHOSTBUSTERS II character Dana Barrett in the film, and Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, and Ernie Hudson are believed to be in the mix as well. All four of them have read the script.

Jason Reitman's GHOSTBUSTERS begins filming next month and is scheduled to reach theatres on July 10, 2020.