Morning Deal Report: Calling All Ghostbusters

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 14:30:00 GMT

Summer is definitely over as far as the weekend box office is concerned. When the top movie of the week is Nicolas Cage in Bangkok Dangerous, you know things are a little slow. Taking in only $7.8 million was still good enough for first place, as Tropic Thunder fell to second with $7.5 million. The total weekend gross is expected to be around $66 million, which is what The Dark Knight was taking in at lunch hour just a few weeks ago.

Who ya gonna call? Well, if Ghostbusters is the answer, I’m not sure I even want to know the question. But Variety reports that Columbia Pictures is serious about rounding up the old gang for another round of spook hunting. “The studio has set The Office co-exec producers Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky to write a script for a film designed to bring back together the original cast of Harold Ramis, Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd and Ernie Hudson…The scribes just wrote Year One, a comedy that was directed by Ramis.” I can see Bill Murray being hard up for cash given the news of his divorce but, really, do they expect to be able to lure Ernie Hudson back?

Ed Norton, Susan Sarandon and Richard Dreyfus will star in Leaves of Grass. It’s not an adaptation of the Walt Whitman poetry collection, but rather “a comedic thriller actor-turned-filmmaker Tim Blake Nelson wrote and is directing.” Per The Hollywood Reporter, “Norton is portraying twin brothers, one an Ivy League philosophy professor, the other a small-time and brilliant marijuana grower. The professor is lured back to his Oklahoma hometown for a doomed scheme against a local drug lord (Dreyfuss) that unravels his life.”

Related:
Trailer Review: Bangkok Dangerous
Ghostbusters III, Sort Of

The Screengrab : richard dreyfus

Morning Deal Report: Calling All Ghostbusters