They were showing Ghostbusters 1 & 2 on TV and it made me wonder if the plan was always the reboot from 2016. I know I heard Bill Murray held up a 3rd movie, but I am honestly surprised nobody said "a female reboot makes no sense" in a board meeting at Sony. I remember they wanted to do sequels but the movie didn't do well enough.
It would have made much more sense to have the remaining crew pass the torch to their kids (a mix of men and women) or something like that. I hope this upcoming movie does well. I remember when it was announced people were screeching on twitter and one guy said "you shouldn't give toxic fans the movie they wanted to begin with". Lesson number 3,543 why you don't listen to Twitter morons.
Also, Ghostbusters 2016 was the first time I started hearing the narrative that if you don't like a movie you are a bad person and seeing critics lose any sense of actual evaluation. Also the first time I saw the now common "the original was never that good" headline which always makes me want to ask "then why are they re-doing it".
Back to my original question was the all female reboot always what was planned?
One of the rumors was that the game released in 2009 was what Ghostbusters 3 would have been. Aykroyd and Ramis had been shopping the idea around for years but never got a studio to commit until out of nowhere Atari noticed in a marketing report that the Ghostbusters logo was right behind Coca Cola (maybe it was Mickey Mouse, I don't remember) as the second most recognized logo on the planet. They decided to cash in on it and got the go-ahead from Paramount to make a game. Aykroyd had already written a script and they brought everyone back to voice it, even getting Max Von Sydow to cameo as Vigo and finding William Atherton to take more abuse as Peck.
The story fit in as well as any sequel could, and it adapted well enough as a game since they only had to write in a few lines referencing "the new guy" or "rookie" for the player character who doesn't even speak. So they adapted an existing outline as a game and even though they got Murray into the studio for voice work he still kind of half-assed it but at least it got made.
If it was the same script, you can see why studios were cagey about it. It would have needed a monster budget and a ton of production time and filming on location. After GB2, it was asking a lot.