A new Ghostbusters movie will be shot in Calgary, but we don’t know yet if it that means Bill Murray will be visiting the southern Alberta city.
Damian Petti, president of film workers’ union IATSE 212, confirmed to Global News on Thursday that Sony had notified the union that it intends to shoot the project in Calgary in 2019.
The movie will be a continuation of the 1984 original and subsequent 1989 follow-up Ghostbusters II, and not a sequel to the 2016 all-female remake, according to Entertainment Weekly.
Jason Reitman will direct and co-write the film. His father, Ivan Reitman, was the director of both original Ghostbusters films.
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According to an IMDB.com, the working title for the movie was Rust City.
Few other details are known about the project.
A teaser trailer for the project was released last month on ghostbusters.com and the official Ghostbusters YouTube channel.
2019 marks the 35th anniversary of the original Ghostbusters. Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Ernie Hudson and Harold Ramis starred in the original but it’s unknown if Murray, Aykroyd or Hudson would be in the 2020 project. Ramis died in 2014.
In an email to Global News, Petti said Alberta’s motion picture industry is a “fragile one” with its “share of challenges.”
“Despite our lackluster provincial incentive program, we appear to be ramping up for another busy cycle,” he said.
Petti said the news about the new Ghostbusters film comes at a critical time for the province’s film industry. He said there’s a “gold rush” in Canada when it comes to productions, and hopes Alberta can tap into it.
“We’ve asked all the political parties to commit to working with the industry to building a more stable incentive program,” Petti said Thursday. “When a jurisdiction has a healthy film industry there are so many other spin offs into the economy. It’s fresh money coming in.”
There have been 136 projects shot in the province since October 2017, when the screen-based production grant was launched, according to Alberta’s culture and tourism ministry.
Officials said more than $260 million was spent in Alberta on those projects with an added $105 million in “non-labour related spending.”
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