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If you decide to see Ghostbusters this weekend, go in knowing that there’s even more where that came from. When Collider’s own Steve Weintraub sat down with the film’s director Paul Feig for the Ghostbusters press day, the filmmaker revealed that he already has an extended cut of the movie locked and loaded for home video release. Now this doesn’t sound like it’s a director’s cut per se, just a longer cut of the movie, but it does include a significant amount of new footage mined from a very long version of the movie that existed in its early stages:
“The editor’s first cut was 4 hours and 15 minutes, and I trimmed that down to a slim 3 and a half hours (laughs). We generate a lot of stuff and I always wanna have all the underpinnings of a big, emotional story, and because of that it just added a lot of extra scenes that as you’re going through, you know you have to make a lot of choices because I knew I had to bring this down under two hours. You just start weeding and saying, ‘What do people want to delve deeper into and what do we wanna just kind of skirt through and get to the fun parts?’”
This is par for the course when it comes to comedies, and it’s hard to blame Feig for having such a long cut given that his cast of Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, Kate McKinnon, and Leslie Jones is made up of such strong improvisational talents. But as for the specific length of the extended cut, it’ll clock in at around 2 hours and 11 minutes:
“We actually just finished [the extended cut] so it’s about another 15 minutes longer, but I will also include a lot of the deleted scenes and extra material that we have on the DVD.”
But rest assured, those ghosts in the new scenes won’t simply be rough VFX—Sony gave Feig the budget to completely finish the extra footage:
“It’s actually some stuff that we finished the VFX on just because we wanted to have this nice-looking extended cut too, so it was very kind of the studio to let us finish all of that.”
So if you’re a fan of the new Ghostbusters, know that the home video release of the film will be packed with extras and an even longer cut of the film, so there's plenty more joy to be found. But first, the theatrical cut hits theaters on July 15th.
