We’ve got 10 years now and two follow up movies to look back on 2016’s Ghostbusters: Answer the Call and its place both in Ghostbusters canon and fanon as well at its place in the American political landscape. Buckle up, this going to go some strange places (though maybe not unfamiliar from the last time I talked about Answer the Call).

The Framing Debate at the Soul of Ghostbusting

It was said that the origins of the Ghostbusters franchise was the idea of “what if there was a franchise business of Ghostbusters, ghost hunters that legitimately work, across many US cities?” We didn’t get that story for a lot of reasons, such as the practical budgetary standpoint that filming in multiple cities would have been more expensive.

There seems to be a sort of underlying split that is said to have formed among the Ghostbusters collaborators and is rather interestingly reflected in the completed projects. The “it’s a profitable franchise” side saw Ghostbusters as maybe something akin to a franchise law service, a little more white collar and maybe expensive, and the other side of the split saw Ghostbusters as more blue collar akin to custodial services, plumbers, and (especially) firefighters.

It seems that part of why that original premise broke down and the white collar advocates “lost” was the more reliable and wealthy Ghostbusters are, the less their reality resembles ours. Ghostbusters seem to work best when they are scrappy startups, near broke, struggling to make a buck.

I think where it leaves us, though, is that the two sides became less white collar versus blue collar, but a lot more privatized fire fighting versus volunteer fire departments.

In the real world, the history of privatized fire fighting is full of human-caused disasters. It’s also a debate that goes back pretty far in US history and has political ramifications to this day. It’s a libertarian ideal to have privatized fire fighters and let “the market” take care of it. It’s a very well proven practical mistake to allow for profit fire fighting because that tends to turn into fire starting and protection rackets.

The first two Ghostbusters movies are effectively about the Ghostbusters trying and failing to be a privatized firefighting force, presumably because they have ethics enough not to try fire starting (and instead allow that to only be an accident of bureaucracy in the second movie). The most recent two are wishy washy at best and seem to be trying to establish Ghostbusters as a charitable arm of a for profit company we don’t seem to have enough details about. Answer the Call does the best thing and ends with those Ghostbusters implied to be getting converted into a civil service, just like a real volunteer fire department.

It Was Always About DEI and The Extreme Ghostbusters Rules

Extreme Ghostbusters is generally underappreciated in Ghostbusters canon/fanon. It’s a weird sequel from a decade where everyone assumed there would be no new movies, but there was still an urge to sell kids new toys. In theory, Extreme was a direct sequel to Real Ghostbusters, but for a number of reasons (toy sales) needed to be a soft reboot. Extreme helped make explicit text that Ghostbusters was partly always about diversity, equity, and inclusion. Anybody can be a Ghostbuster. Extreme made text out of subtext in the first two movies one of subtler rules of the canon that keeps the canon fresh, scrappy, and relatable: people forget quickly about ghosts.

From a Watsonian perspective (in world/in character) this is because people generally want to live in a rational world. Because ectoplasm affects memories as it affects emotions (as it was key to the plot of Ghostbusters 2). Because of that real world phenomenon like Y2K that when the disaster is prevented people assume it couldn’t have been a real threat, even with evidence remaining to the contrary.

From a Doylist perspective (authorial) it’s what helps keep the Ghostbusters a blue collar Volunteer Firefighting Department in a world relatively like ours, rather than world-traveling Celebrity Superheroes with a big unrelatable business. (The debate mentioned above among even the collaborators of the first movie, where some assumed Ghostbusters would be a big franchise company and others thought it funnier if it was scrappier and more janitorial and blue collar.)

The tech still remains, because it is a science, but the people forget. For reasons, Extreme starts with Cartoon Egon (who may or may not be Movie Egon, but that’s another discussion) as the last Ghostbuster who remembers, only about five years after the events of the movie (and worse only about a year or two after Real Ghostbusters events) having gone back to academia, teaching, and for reasons having to recruit the next generation of Ghostbusters from students actually paying attention to his lectures and showing evidence they could believe. That led to the most extreme of Ghostbusters: teens with attitude and cool expensive toys they barely could afford; ethnically diverse, both genders, and even a differently abled Ghostbuster! Which is to say the moral message of Extreme GB really was: Get woke, go broke, catch ghosts!

Answer the Call also starts in academia, and that could be a call back to the first movie, but I maintain it was a shout out to Extreme, for a number of reasons but also because Kate McKinnon’s Holtzmann wears Cartoon Egon hair. I still think Neil Casey’s villain, Rowan North, seemed to have found access to and reversed engineered Ghostbusters tech, implying the previous films happened. (He claims to have only based it on Erin and Abby’s book, but a “lone genius” stealing other people’s notes certainly would steal other people’s hardware as well.)

Ghostbusters: Afterlife starts in a very similar place with descendants of Movie Egon discovering the lost files of Egon and not believing some of the notes as they start to repeat. Also seems to imply that the New York incursion in GB2 was forgotten somewhat in Extreme GB ways, not a lasting Ghost 9/11 (or the MCU’s Battle of New York). Would also explain why they hadn’t heard of Answer the Call’s events. (And the events do basically match the studio insisted sequel bait at the end of Answer the Call even though none of the cast involved carried over.)

For the most part I still think with the Extreme Ghostbusters rule in play that “people forget” and “people forget quickly” that all of the movies and probably Extreme can fit the same canon, if you want them to.

Venkman is the Tech Bro CEO

Who is the main character of Ghostbusters and Ghostbusters 2?

The easy answer is that they are ensemble films and there’s no main character.

The common answer is that Peter Venkman fills that story role simply because he gets the opening character slot, chews up screen time, and is played by “notable leading man” Bill Murray.

The nuanced answer, and I’ve seen at least one otherwise forgettable videogame make the case for it is that Winston Zeddemore is the real main character of the first two films. He’s the “everyman” audience stand-in. (How much of not seeing Winston as the main character has to do with him being the “diversity hire” in the movie?)

I appreciate both the easy and the nuanced answer and I’ve started to find, partly because of how poorly the character of Peter Venkman has aged over the years that Venkman has started to me to feel less like the “main character” to me and lot more like the character with Main Character Syndrome. Looking at Venkman’s role on the team, I think he seems to fill the Tech Bro CEO role.

Ray and Egon treat Venkman like a peer as a scientist, but everything we see of his science suggests he is a charlatan and is well funded to do the bare minimum and to know the bare minimum of his alleged science. He comes across as charismatic (though misogynistic) which helps him raise those funds. He comes across as the libertarian sort who is pushing the Ghostbusters to be a profitable business, especially as he tries to be the celebrity public face of the business.

I think that is more reason why Venkman as a character especially hasn’t aged well. We’ve definitely seen a shift in how we think of the Tech Bro CEO over the last couple of decades, especially considering 2016 a pivot year in that.

Answer the Call in the extended cut makes it easy to compare and contrast its opening Ghostbuster, Kristen Wiig’s Dr. Erin Gilbert, versus Venkman. Her very first conversation is with the sort of character that could have been the film’s Venkman, getting berated that open science isn’t worth much and the real goal should be awards (and presumably grants/money). Erin is shown to be a real scientist in every way, including being nerdy and a bit introverted and not very successful “politically” in her career. In a way that gives her a sense of also somewhat filling the “everyman” and audience stand-in roles for what is to come. She’s absolutely not the Tech Bro CEO.

In something of a reversal it feels like Leslie Jones’ Patty Tolan takes something of that “CEO role” with the Ghostbusters struggling to raise funds and resources until she shows up. It’s also funny that Afterlife and Frozen Empire follow up on this with Winston Zeddemore becoming the wealthy patron of the Ghostbusters.

(What business does Winston build his wealthy empire on, we don’t seem to know. Ernie Hudson’s cameo as Patty’s funeral director uncle is possibly the only hint of how that happened, for fanon at least.)

Ghostbusting Should Be a Civil Service

As mentioned, Answer the Call in the extended cut starts with a debate of open science versus proprietary science and ends with its Ghostbusters in both cuts seemingly becoming a civil service.

One of the minor antagonists of Answer the Call are from an unnamed agency underneath the Department of Homeland Security, presumably somewhere on the org chart between FEMA and ICE. While they are played off as somewhat inept and aren’t given much in scientific or technical support they do make good points that ghostbusting should be a civil service. (I also feel like they almost directly acknowledge the Extreme Ghostbusters rules with a line, “The cat has been out of the bag before, but yet, people lose interest and put it back in.”)

At the end of the movie NYC Mayor’s office supplies a budget for ghostbusting and implies that its Ghostbusters have become a city volunteer fire department of sorts.

I really think this is the best way that Ghostbusters should be run, and I love that in 2016 Ghostbusters went there.

It suggests, subtly in the extended cut, that ghostbusting should be an open, peer reviewed science, even despite having an antagonist who misuses the exact same science.

About the only thing more you might ask is for the Ghostbusters to unionize, not just in how much they unionize the particles of ghosts (dad science joke, given how much the movie talks about ionized apparitions), but also further drawing the parallels the movie makes between the Ghostbusters and the MTA.

Bonus Round: Frozen Empire says AGBAB

A lot of the privatized firefighting versus volunteer fire department debate breaks down in a gross way once you start to question if All Ghostbusters Are Bastards. Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire is possibly the worst entry in the franchise on that score and does a lot to ask AGBAB questions it refuses to quite answer in a well written or coherent way. It tries to have its “ghosts are like fires and natural disasters” cake but chokes on it on the way down trying to eat it.

If ghosts are people (or at least formerly people in many cases), who elected the Ghostbusters judge, jury, and sometimes executioner of ghosts? Exploring the metaphor too deeply reveals that Ghostbusters are less like volunteer firefighters and more like a private police force/militia with a very strange minority that they deal with.

The cartoons decided relatively early on that the containment unit was simply a “one-way” portal to the “ghost realm” purgatory that is a ghost’s natural/”native” dimension from which they build incursions or simply just leak into the real world. Containing them becomes sending them “home” and things like parole and moving on are left to natural laws and/or possibly higher powers. Eventually the cartoons would even sometimes visit the ghost realm for reasons. (This is also basically exactly the premise of Danny Phantom, too, if that’s part of your Ghostbusters fanon.)

Answer the Call mostly takes this perspective as well, the large incursion force returning to a spirit world on the other side of “the barrier” and two of its Ghostbusters even briefly travel into the spirit portal and have the Danny Phantom (and other pop culture) thing happen of experiences crossing the portal causing one’s hair to entirely whiten. We don’t have details on how their containment unit works because they mostly didn’t build it until the epilogue, but there isn’t enough to question if it might just be a one-way portal across the barrier.

Frozen Empire on the other hand is deeply frustrating. It opens with a cold open that tries to hammer home the volunteer fire department imagery, includes an inherited chosen one pyromancer Superhero cops as an ancient proto-version of Ghostbusters, and then gives us the terribly conflicting and deeply problematic side by side of telling us unequivocally that the containment unit stores ghosts as “particle smoothies”, which doesn’t seem great for seemingly conscious beings, much less providing any ability for reform or parole. Then the movie drops the hammer that its ghosts do follow “unfinished business” rules at least some of the time and sometimes are redeemable. Where’s the ghost justice system when you need it? I demand my ghost lawyer be present around anyone carrying a proton pack. Frozen Empire turns Ghostbusters into a Judge Dredd dystopia for ghosts. The worst part is I don’t think it was entirely intentional, I think it was just sloppy “try to over-explain the science that doesn’t really need to be explained” in the same movie as sloppier “use other ghost tropes” (oh hey, we haven’t had a ghost with “unfinished business” yet in one of these movies, and let’s make it a redeemable little scamp), but wow does it leave a sour taste for me a few hours after watching it when I remember why I am angry with it.

It seems grossly relevant to when it released and each year since to America’s troubled relationship with especially ICE. If Ghostbusters are an immigrant police force, Frozen Empire seems to accidentally suggest it is fine they work with impunity and without oversight or real, reformative (ectocorrectional) justice.

Is There Still Time to Answer the Call?

In my Halloween movie rewatches this year it felt very easy to say that Answer the Call remains my favorite of the films and Frozen Empire might be the worst of them. (Mostly saved by Paul Rudd’s presence, which is also low compared to Afterlife.) Answer the Call is laugh out loud funny through most of its run. The jokes generally punch up, rather than down. It’s not resting so much of its laurels on nostalgia, though it hits my nostalgia for Extreme Ghostbusters. It breaks out far more of the cartoon toys than any of the other movies. I also love that it shows it as a science, with multiple iterations across its tech development curve.

Answer the Call sides with the ideal ghostbusting should be a public service and that profit motives might corrupt it. It doesn’t let a Tech Bro CEO pollute that.

With a decade of hindsight it is easier to see why its “incel” antagonist and its side of the debate in that Ghostbusters should not be a for profit business touched some real political nerves in the US in 2016, things that remain unfortunately still relevant and hard fought in 2026. It seems less surprising that Answer the Call was so terribly review bombed (a thing the movie itself makes jokes about) given what else was happening that year in the US. It seems less surprising that the franchise skewed too far the other direction politically, to the point of going full AGBAB in 2024 without intending it to be a political statement but just accidentally catching an ugly political reality of its time.

I still think that the events in Answer the Call fit the canon far too well. Ghostbusters managed to be a civic, volunteer organization for just a few years starting in 2016 before city and federal budget cuts presumably killed them and then the role became a nepotistic billionaire supported “philanthropy” in 2021. It’s certainly frustrating how much that parallels too much of US politics in about the same time period.

Answer the Call seems to be aging surprisingly well, and is worth rewatching. (Especially if you need to cleanse a little after Frozen Empire.)