The 2024 American horror comedy film Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire was directed by Gil Kenan from a screenplay he co-wrote with Jason Reitman. It is the fifth movie in the Ghostbusters franchise and the follow-up to Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021). Along with Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Ernie Hudson, Annie Potts, and William Atherton returning their roles from the previous films, the picture stars Paul Rudd, Carrie Coon, Finn Wolfhard, Mckenna Grace, Celeste O’Connor, and Logan Kim in their roles from Afterlife. The cast also includes James Acaster, Emily Alyn Lind, Patton Oswalt, and Kumail Nanjiani.

The story of Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire is Callie Spengler, her boyfriend Gary Grooberson, her kids Trevor and Phoebe, and their close friends Lucky Domingo and Podcast move to New York City three years after the events in Summerville, Oklahoma, to help Ray Stantz and Winston Zeddemore resurrect the Ghostbusters. The Ghostbusters’ longtime rival Walter Peck threatens to shut them down after the gang captures a ghost in Hell’s Kitchen. Callie seats Phoebe, who is underage, to placate him. Phoebe, upset, goes to a local park to play chess in an attempt to manage her feelings. There, she meets and befriends Melody, a ghostly chess prodigy who perished in a fire.

Ray and Podcast are gathering cursed items to examine in the interim. During their visit, Nadeem Razmaadi offers them an odd metal ball that belonged to his late grandmother and has ceremonial symbols on it. It looks to Ray like an apotropaic trap. He tests the orb’s PKE levels, and then it releases a psionic pulse that destroys the Ghostbusters’ firehouse headquarters’ ecto-containment unit, which is dangerously close to capacity. Winston brings the orb to Dr. Lars Pinfield, a colleague of his, at his privately held paranormal research center. Pinfield tries to extract anything from the orb using an experimental extraction apparatus, but he is unable to do so. He goes to meet Nadeem with Trevor and Lucky in order to find out more, and Nadeem tells him that his grandmother concealed the orb in a room lined with brass. Nadeem’s latent pyrokinetic abilities are discovered by Peter Venkman, who is called in to assist.

Ray meets Dr. Hubert Wartzki, a research librarian at the New York Public Library, in the meantime with Phoebe and Podcast. According to Wartzki, the orb was created by four sorcerers known as the Firemasters to house Garraka, a demonic god who fed on negative emotions to drive down temperatures to an absolute zero and attempted to take over the globe with a ghost army. They find out that one of the Firemasters who stopped Garraka from unintentionally fleeing the orb in 1904 during a fictitious rite performed by members of the Manhattan Adventurers’ Society is the ancestor of Nadeem’s grandmother. Garraka froze to death. Due to his vulnerability to copper alloys paired with fire and the lack of his devil horns as a power source, Garraka was trapped inside the orb.

Peck takes advantage of Phoebe’s involvement to shut down the Ghostbusters as the three try to stop a ghost from stealing an audio recording of the club’s ritual. Following a confrontation with Gary and her mother, Phoebe flees and escorts Melody to Winston’s research facility. For two minutes, she projects herself as a ghost using his extraction apparatus so they can engage in physical contact. Melody discloses that she had been clandestinely collaborating with Garraka, proposing to set him free in return for a ticket to the hereafter. After making Phoebe repeat the ceremonial chant, Garraka finds his horns, makes his getaway, and freezes the city with Nadeem’s help, who dons his grandmother’s brass armor and tries to hone his abilities, the Ghostbusters mobilize to protect their headquarters after learning that Garraka will release the ghosts in the containment unit.

Garraka defeats them and gets over the containment barrier. Phoebe strengthens her proton pack by reconfiguring it with copper alloys, while Melody, who feels betrayed by Garraka, makes amends by assisting Nadeem in using his abilities to damage Garraka. Ray uses the breached containment unit to trap the deity. Melody makes amends with Phoebe before leaving to join her family in the afterlife. Peck is compelled to back the group and bring Phoebe back when the city begins to thaw and the Ghostbusters are praised as heroes. The Ghostbusters start searching New York City for runaway ghosts.

Many viewers requested a sequel after Afterlife’s success, and Sony Pictures finally gave their consent in April 2022. Reitman will once again helm the film. Later in December, Reitman continued to serve as co-writer and co-producer while Kenan, an executive producer and co-writer, assumed directorial duties. Several actors were confirmed to return, including Rudd, Coon, Grace, Wolfhard, O’Connor, Kim, Murray, Aykroyd, Hudson, Potts, and Atherton. In March 2023, Nanjiani, Oswalt, Lind, and Acaster were confirmed as new cast members. Principal photography started in that same month and ended in June of that same year. Rob Simonsen, the Afterlife composer, was replaced as the film’s composer by Dario Marianelli. After co-creator and father of Jason Reitman, Ivan Reitman, passed away, this is the first Ghostbusters movie to be released. Ivan Reitman is recognized as a producer along with his son and Jason Blumenfeld. The movie honors Reitman’s memory and marks the first movie’s 40th anniversary.

Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire debuted globally on March 14, 2024, at the AMC 13 Theater in Lincoln Square in New York City. Sony Pictures Releasing, operating under the Columbia Pictures banner, distributed the film in the US on March 22. The movie earned over $177 million worldwide and went on to become the ninth highest-grossing picture of 2024 despite receiving mixed reviews from critics.

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