Paul Feig’s ‘Ghostbusters’ Reboot Will Stay in New York and Have “Fun Nods” to the Original

It’s no secret that we’re officially pumped for Paul Feig’s ‘Ghostbusters’ reboot—especially after that hilariously awesome trailer for his upcoming film ‘Spy,’ which reunites him with Melissa McCarthy. We recently reported that McCarthy is in talks to play one of the leads in ‘Ghostbusters,’ which seemed like a pretty likely scenario as soon as the film was announced. Feig has taken a forthcoming approach to talking about the reboot, and in his latest interview, he has even more reassuring information for fans of the franchise.

Transparency is definitely the best way to approach rebooting a property as beloved as ‘Ghostbusters,’ and fans have already been through enough over the last several years with Dan Aykroyd’s relentless attempts to make a third installment in the franchise—plans which continuously (and thankfully) failed to really come together. We want to know we aren’t going to be burned here.

Feig has shared a lot of information about how and why he’s making the new ‘Ghostbusters,’ and in a new interview with Empire, he happily shared more information about the project. First of all, he’s keeping the New York setting from the original film:

To me it’s such a New York movie and the biggest sin would be to pull it out of there. I just love New York and, selfishly, I just want to shoot in New York.

He’s also not interested in trying to duplicate the original or be overly-referential, but his reboot will feature “fun nods” and will acknowledge the existence of the classic film—although he has previously said that the reboot takes place in a world where people aren’t aware of ghosts, which will allow him to start fresh:

We’re not recreating the old movie, but we want to do just enough fun nods that the fans will go, ‘Oh, okay, they’re acknowledging that the other movie existed.’ I like to watch parodies, but I don’t want to do them because they’re too referential. Comedy that’s too referential has such a short shelf life, whereas comedy that’s based around characters will be relatable 2000 years from now because people won’t change that much.

Feig remains optimistic, and while explaining (yet again) why he’s making the reboot, he hopes that both his film and the original can happily co-exist:

A lot of people ask why I didn’t create my own thing, but Ghostbusters never ran out of steam, it’s such a great idea, It’s such a fun franchise so why not bring it to a new generation? The old movie is never going to not exist. It’s not my plan to erase every copy! Hopefully they can all live together.

We’ll continue to keep an eye on the development of the ‘Ghostbusters’ reboot, but everything Feig has said so far has us very excited. In the meantime, Feig and McCarthy will give us plenty to laugh about when ‘Spy’ hits theaters on May 22.