Ivan Reitman, director of Ghostbusters and Ghostbusters II, and producer of the 2016 Ghostbusters and final 12 months’s Ghostbusters: Afterlife movies, handed away this previous Saturday. He was 75.

Born in Czechoslovakia, Reitman got here to Canada when he was 4 years outdated. His directing profession started in 1971 with Foxy Lady, starring Eugene Levy, however encompassed the hit comedies Stripes, Meatballs, Twins, Kindergarten Cop, Dave, and Junior. But he was much more prolific as a producer, who introduced movies like Animal House, the unique animated Heavy Metal film, Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot, Howard Stern’s Private Parts, the Will Smith superhero movie Hancock, the 2017 Baywatch film, and extra.

Reitman will seemingly be finest remembered because the co-creator and steward of the Ghostbusters franchise. He’s the one who took Dan Aykroyd’s original script—which concerned a cadre of intergalactic ghostbusters throughout time and house, which might have been catastrophically costly to make within the early ‘80—and convinced him to set it on Earth, give it a more realistic vibe, and pass the screenplay to Harold Ramis. He also convinced Columbia Pictures to make the movie, which was no small feat as it was one of the most expensive comedies ever made at the time.

The popularity of the original 1984 led to a great deal of interest in turning the movie into a franchise. In addition to the 1989 sequel Ghostbusters II and the 1986 cartoon The Real Ghostbusters, a third Ghostbusters film was pretty much in development since the first sequel premiered. Reitman also announced a cartoon series called Ghostbusters: Ecto Force in 2016, but nothing has ever been seen from the project.

Other projects that Reitman had been announced to make were a Batman film in the early ‘80s starring Bill Murray as Bruce Wayne and David Bowie as Joker, along with a Wonder Woman movie in 1996. He was also one of the candidates to direct Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. He’s survived by his son, Jason, who additionally directed final 12 months’s Ghostbusters sequel Afterlife, starring a lot of the unique two films’ forged.

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