Ghostbusters star Dan Akroyd has defended the 2016 all-female reboot film.
The actor famously played Raymond Stantz in the original 1980s films, recently reprising the role in Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire this year.
The franchise was rebooted with a separate film from Paul Feig in 2016 starring Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, Kate McKinnon and Leslie Jones, which was met with a sexist and racist backlash at the time.
Akroyd has now shared his praise of the film, telling People: “I liked the movie [director] Paul Feig made with those spectacular women.
“I was mad at them at the time because I was supposed to be a producer on there and I didn’t do my job and I didn’t argue about costs. And it cost perhaps more than it should, and they all do. All these movies do.”
“But boy, I liked that film,” he continued. “I thought that the villain at the end was great. I loved so much of it. And of course, Kate McKinnon and Leslie Jones and Melissa McCarthy and Kristen Wiig, you’re never going to do better than that.
“So I go on the record as saying I’m so proud to have been able to license that movie and have a hand and have a part in it, and I’m fully supportive of it, and I don’t besmirch it at all. I think it works really great amongst all the ones that have been made.”
Akroyd spoke in defence of star Jones around the time of the film’s release after she was subjected to racist and sexist abuse on social media, calling the trolls “insignificant gnats” and “losers” with “no lives of their own”.
In the interview with ET Canada, he also labelled them “obese white men between 50 and 60 who are active [Klu Klux] Klan members or members of the Aryan nation. There are millions of them.”
Meanwhile, fellow Ghostbusters star Ernie Hudson (Winston Zeddemore) spoke earlier this year about the 2016 film, admitting he was less keen on the reboot.
“Fans were really invested in the story and the characters and I think it was disappointing,” he told The Independent. “I enjoyed the movie but I think it wasn’t what fans were hoping for.”
Frozen Empire, which included Akroyd and Hudson alongside fellow original Ghostbusters star Bill Murray, was released in cinemas in March, and follows on from 2021’s reboot Ghostbusters: Afterlife.
In NME‘s four-star review, we said: “Like Afterlife, Frozen Empire ultimately succeeds because it’s so much fun to watch. The writers are so comfortable in this world that they get away with poking fun at Ray Parker Jr.’s ludicrous ’80s theme tune, then cranking it out unabashedly at the climax. And guess what, like Ghostbusters as a whole, it’s still a banger.”
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