Dan Aykroyd Doesn’t Want to Hear Your Female Ghostbuster Slander

When Paul Feig rebooted the Ghostbusters franchise in 2016 with a cast led by Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, Kate McKinnon and Leslie Jones, no one was prepared for the backlash. “A lot of people have a lot of passionate opinions, and the internet allows them to directly express those opinions to you,” Feig told The Hollywood Reporter in 2022. “It just took me back to grade school and bullies. The bummer is that all we did was try to make a movie to make people laugh.”

In other words, it sucked for everyone involved. “I don’t get the fight to see who can be the most negative and the most hate-filled,” McCarthy told Yahoo! Entertainment five years later. “Everybody should be able to tell the story they want to tell. If you don’t want to see it, you don’t have to see it.”

Original Ghostbuster Ernie Hudson saw it, and he wasn’t a fan. “I have nothing negative about (Feig) to say,” he told The Independent in March. “Other than: I don’t quite understand why you do a reboot, you know what I mean? Just make another movie.” (Translation: Why didn’t Feig make another Ghostbusters that had Ernie Hudson in it?)

“I think it was disappointing,” Hudson continued. “I enjoyed the movie, but I think it wasn’t what fans were hoping for.”

But not all of the pioneering Ghostbusters agree with the slams. “I liked the movie Paul Feig made with those spectacular women," Dan Aykroyd recently told PEOPLE. 

Aykroyd, though, wasn’t as supportive when the movie came out. “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,” he explained. “And it cost perhaps more than it should, and they all do. All these movies do.”

But now that production budget woes are in the rear-view mirror, Aykroyd says the Wiig-led version got a bad shake. “Boy, I liked that film,” he maintained. “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.”

Aykroyd is currently on a press tour promoting his new Audible oral history of Blues Brothers. “I still have these two very active offices to manage, Blues Brothers and Ghostbusters,” Aykroyd said about his non-vodka-related side gigs. “I thought I could retire five years ago, but it hasn’t worked out that way. That’s okay. I’m grateful for the privilege to keep going.”