Ghostbusters trailer: Wiig & McCarthy get bustin'

Video by News Team | 03 Mar 2016

Director Paul Feig reveals the trailer for his new take on 80s classic Ghostbusters, with Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, Kate McKinnon and Leslie Jones the new team kicking paranormal butt

“Thirty years ago four scientists saved New York. This summer, a new team will answer the call,” reads the opening titles on the mint fresh Ghostbusters trailer released today. Director Paul Feig revealed it on Twitter with a simple “Here you go.”

This is the first opportunity to gauge the chemistry between the new all-female team, which is made up of Kristen Wiig, Kate McKinnon, Leslie Jones and Feig’s regular leading woman Melissa McCarthy (this is their fourth feature together following Bridesmaids, The Heat and Spy). The dynamic between the four leads seems to have shades of the original lineup, with Wiig playing an Egon Spengler-esque boffin and McCarthy as the Ray Stantz-like leader of the pack. We see less of McKinnon and Jones in the trailer, but the former seems to be a kickass engineer who doesn’t take the whole busting lark too seriously (maybe she’s the Murray figure) and the latter plays the Winston Zeddemore-like layperson along for the ride.

The new trailer is extremely promising. We see Wiig get slimed by a class 4 apparition (“that stuff went everywhere, by the way. In every crack – very hard to wash off”) and McCarthy's head spin 360 degrees – The Exorcist-style – and ghosts generally run amok in downtown Manhattan. As Dan Aykroyd told us when we spoke to him a few years ago, this connection to New York City is one of the original film’s chief assets: “We had no permits, we were stealing scenes everywhere. We’d take the camera and shoot something down at the end of the block and we’d have a mob of real people in shot... They were looking at us, but being New Yorkers they were thinking ‘This must be some new kind of sanitation thing or something.’ They would have a double take then they would be on their way like New Yorkers do.”

Will the new film has this same zip and lightness of the original? We'll find out 15 July, when the film gets its UK release. Until then, let us know what you think of the trailer in the comments below.