A veritable oroboros of mediocrity!

Wait, wait, to be clear, I'm not saying this movie will be mediocre. I've not seen it and I wouldn't want to judge Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire based it's trailer (although, that's kind of what they're for), but I do want to make a broader point about the perils of relying too heavily on nostalgia. Like, way too heavily.

Although if I were to judge it based on the trailer, I'd probably point
out that there are too many kids in it. That is to say, more than zero kids.

Above: a tautological analogy?

I don't know if you've seen the trailer, but it leans into the original 80's movie like the guy in Hang-On leans into a curve and--huh? Oh, sorry, it's an old arcade game. Yes, from the 1980's. My point is that there's virtually nothing in the trailer that's not there to remind us of a thing from the 1984 movie. There's Harold Ramis, and Annie Potts, and wow, Rick Moranis? And Slimer, and the lion statues outside of the New York Central Library, and the ghost from inside the library. 

They even got Walter Peck, the EPA guy who hates the Ghostbusters because in the 80's I guess it was cool to hate the environment? Which, I mean, how'd that work out?

Pictured: how that worked out.

In an absolutely controversial opinion, the
Melissa McCarthy remake was better than
the Paul Rudd remake. There, I said it.

Virtually everything in the trailer is there to make you go: I remember that from Ghostbusters. I'm italicizing that because I'm referring specifically to the 1984 movie which, in an absolutely uncontroversial opinion, was the best one. And I'm kind of wondering if that's just for the trailer or if it really is just two hours of references and callbacks. Because if it's the latter and not the former, I have a concern that maybe hewing too closely to the original might work against it. You know, by making us wish we were watching that instead of, you know, Paul Rudd ghost busting with a bunch of kids. Like, I get the instinct though.

Like some kind of adult vitamin for
nerds, with 200% of your daily nostalgia.

The studios that put the money up for movies like this do so because they're banking on a built in audience, which in turn is going to see movies like this because they know that the studios are going to do everything they can to please them. It's sort of a closed system where fan service is converted into box office returns which then go back into more fan service; an ouroboros of safe entertainment. And I'm exactly the kind of person that this sort of thing is specially formulated for: a nerd of a certain age.

I know this, and yet it's not going to stop me from handing over my twelve dollars and perpetuating the cycle of movie studios guaranteeing an audience by pandering to their lost youths as the world spins further out of control and everything if unfamiliar and frightening. 

I'll feel kind of bad about it, but I'll still--hey! Hey, it's Slimer!
Wow, I can't believe they got him back. I thought he retired...