‘Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire’ Only Exists Because Gen X Can’t Let Go of ‘80s Culture

When Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire opens this weekend, it stands a decent chance of setting a record for the franchise – at least technically speaking. Projected to make around $45 million in its first three days, it only needs a slight uptick from that number to attain the highest-grossing first weekend for a Ghostbusters movie, which involves surpassing… the reboot from 2016 that was a financial disappointment and an unexpected battleground for hundreds of dimwitted YouTubers. Of course, these numbers don’t account for inflation – but even attempting to tally up ticket sales, rather than 35 years of rising prices, the series record is held by Ghostbusters II, which notched the biggest non-holiday opening weekend of all time back in 1989 (though Batman eclipsed it shortly thereafter). Conspicuously missing from this list of records? The original Ghostbusters, from 1984. You know, the one that people actually like. (Even adjusting for inflation, that one’s opening weekend remains the smallest.)

And hey, some people like some of the other Ghostbusters movies. Ghostbusters II was fairly reviled in its day, but reads more like a harmless cash-in now, buoyed by plenty of low stakes childhood HBO reruns and the fun of seeing Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Harold Ramis, and Ernie Hudson slip back into their old comedic dynamic. As much as some 44-year-old with a FunkoPop collection will whip out his finest Ben Shapiro impression to explain why the lady-centric 2016 Ghostbusters is a desecration, it too is harmless: amusing and likable, if nowhere near the original. The two newer movies, which serve as legacy sequels to the original films with more of a Stranger Things vibe (complete with that show’s Finn Wolfhard), have their fans. Some kids seem to like them, when they watch them.

But do many kids want to watch them? Do kids need to watch them, the way they might have felt the need to seek out Ghostbusters in 1984 to give their playground games more verisimilitude? Probably not. Of course, enduring kid appeal or a sense of cultural currency are not must-have attributes for a movie, big-budget or otherwise. There’s just a clear ceiling on a Ghostbusters movie that’s not coming out for the first time in 1984. Unless Frozen Empire is a bigger-than-expected breakout that overcomes series-worst reviews, it’ll do numbers that look a lot like every other Ghostbusters follow-up, indicating a moderate level of interest from a certain number of nostalgic fans and/or families looking for something fun and not too scary.

Yet the series persists in being treated as a big deal – as “IP” that has its own dedicated production company, Ghost Corps. In some ways, this makes as much sense as anything else; the original film was a genuine cultural phenomenon, spending years as the single highest-grossing comedy of all time (which makes it unusual that the new movies don’t really want to be comedies, but nevermind!). It spawned not just a sequel but a Saturday morning cartoon, a popular toyline, and a soft drink that lasted way longer than you’d think. On the other hand, when your repurposed HI-C flavor has greater staying power than your sequel, that might be a sign that your movie is more novelty than saga for the ages.

There’s nothing wrong with novelties, either. Plenty of movies work better as novelties than as Marvel-style build-ups and culminations. Hell, even Star Wars and Jurassic Park, two of the biggest series of all time, have a little bit of this energy. Star Wars tends to do best at the box office when there hasn’t been a Star Wars movie in a while; all three of its trilogy-starters made more money than their respective finales. Jurassic Park and Jurassic World were massive; their respective sequels were merely hits – while also drawing bigger crowds than any Ghostbusters sequel ever has or probably ever will.

This doesn’t mean that everyone hates the Ghostbusters with the fiery passion of Walter Peck, or that the sequels’ standard domestic gross of $125 million is chump change. It does, however, inspire some unkind thoughts about the Gen-X culture that keeps getting pushed out onto 4,000 movie screens. While many 1970s blockbusters have been sequelized, saga-fied, or revisited (Star Wars, Superman, The Godfather), the Jaws sequels were allowed to die off, The Sting left it at one derided follow-up, and no one subjects us to a new Smokey and the Bandit continuation every three years. The 1990s are more heavily mined, but to some degree, studios and filmmakers seem to get the message about which of those audiences might actually crave: Independence Day: Resurgence did not indicate widespread interest in that universe. The Sixth Sense gave us M. Night Shyamalan as his own brand name, not The Seventh Sense. There are sequels to Home Alone – the movie that dethroned Ghostbusters as the biggest comedy ever – but for the most part, they’re regarded as cheapie ephemera, not mythological building blocks.

The 1980s, though, take a cue from their beloved Goonies and never say die. Just last summer, 1989 – the year that birthed Ghostbusters II – was echoed by Micheal Keaton reviving his Batman and Harrison Ford reviving his Indiana Jones alongside a Little Mermaid remake. It’s not confined to massive big-budget blockbusters, either: The NeverEnding Story, true to its name, is coming back, as is The Karate Kid. They came out the same year as the original Ghostbusters, and Beverly Hills Cop, which is getting a long-gap part four this summer on Netflix.

On one level, this is business as usual: remakes, sequels, IP, craven bean-counters movies from executives. On another, it feels specific to Gen-X. Just as Baby Boomers attempted to keep a stranglehold over popular music for as long as possible, venerating the same 1960s acts for decades after their prime, wheeling out the Rolling Stones forever, Gen-X seems to have fixated on a certain kind of adolescent-oriented cinema (perhaps sensing that a lot of Gen-X pop, whether crummy arena rock from the 1970s or more respectable grunge stuff from the early 1990s, has waned in the shadow of those old Boomer faves). Just as the creative output of the Beatles or the Stones gets rehashed, reissued, and relitigated, we must somehow discuss Ghostbusters every few years and receive Top Gun: Maverick as if Tom Cruise himself had returned from the dead, rather than briefly pivoting from his Mission: Impossible series. (Those movies came from the 1990s, so of course they don’t provoke the same emotional reaction.) It all feels like a search for stability, an attempt to extract childhood heroes from a culture that had unhealthy seeds of some very real problems we face 40 years later – to protect beloved movies from all that pesky, nagging context. Is there any demographic more pointlessly and vociferously defensive about what “couldn’t be made today” than fans of Animal House, Beverly Hills Cop, and Die Hard? While also desperately hoping that someone does somehow make those movies again?

This can’t all be laid at the feet of Gen Xers. Millennials and Zoomers claim to want original fare, but don’t necessarily spend their money accordingly. Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire won’t break the bank; it will, however, almost certainly make more than mainstream entertainment like No Hard Feelings, Lisa Frankenstein, or Ferrari. (Possibly more than all of those put together.) It’s the kind of movie that feels most more important to the click economy of entertainment journalism than to actual box office receipts, but either way, it’s happening. It’s certainly possible to do something fun and inventive with the Ghostbusters idea – especially if someone were so bold as to simply rip off its loose-limbed, personality-driven silliness, rather than constructing an ongoing monument to its supposed universe of possibilities. Of course the Ghostbusters aren’t going to save cinema, or your childhood. They’ve already done as much as they can.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.