For the most part, people have been massively enjoying Jason Reitman’s Ghostbusters: Afterlife, which debuted at the top of the box office this weekend with a stronger than expected first frame of $44 million.
While critics haven’t been showering the hybrid of sequel and reboot with universal praise, fans have been lauding it from the rooftops, and a Rotten Tomatoes user rating of 96% makes it perfectly clear that the target audience were thrilled with what Reitman delivered after finally deciding to follow in his father’s footsteps.
One person also left suitably impressed was Kevin Smith, after he revealed his thoughts on Afterlife during the most recent edition of Fatman Beyond, where he offered favorable comparisons to Richard Donner’s classic family film The Goonies.
“You know, for years everyone’s trying to do Goonies. At least in the world I exist in and when I go pitch places, everyone’s trying to figure out how to do a modern-day Goonies which I guess some people feel like that’s what Stranger Things did. I don’t think so, Stranger Things seems like something very different than Goonies to me. Jason Reitman did that with Ghostbusters: Afterlife. Not only is it a Ghostbusters movie, and a very good one, by the way, but it’s also a f*cking Goonies movie. It’s a movie about kids on an adventure.”
Smith is right in saying that plenty of movies have tried and failed to replicate The Goonies model in the intervening decades, but directly comparing the two is hardly a like-for-like comparison other than a group of kids teaming up to go on a fantastical adventure.
Ghostbusters: Afterlife is well-placed to get a sequel, though, something that never happened for the Goonies crew despite 35 years of crossed fingers, vague teases and broken promises that it would end up happening eventually.