It's not a new idea for Bill Murray's Peter Venkman character to appear as a ghost in the proposed third installment of Ghostbusters 3.Harold Ramis has mentioned it a few times, memorably once in an interview with AICN's Quint four and a bit years ago when he said that he and Dan Ackroyd had wrote Ghostbusters Go To Hell, a script they couldn't get a studio to greenlight and was latter dropped. That movie had Murray as a ghost, because it's the only way he saw any fun in returning. This was before the recent Ghostbusters craze, spurred on by the 80's nostalgia movement, recent Blu-Ray and DVD special edition transfers and of course the cool video game which has made a third movie a top priority at Sony/Columbia.
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Does this make Bill Murray one of the villains of the new movie? The original "Murray as a Ghost" development was during the late 90s/early 2000s when a much more awkward, much less humble and less willing Murray walked the Earth, so we presumed he would be over that by now and would find more fun in reuniting on screen with his pals, busting ghosts, and passing on that torch. Or does he still like the ghost idea, which admittedly sounds kinda fun but could only satisfy Bill Murray, and wouldn't be much service to the film itself? So when Sigourney Weaver, mentions without really being prompted in an interview with Channel 4 that Murray has a big part in Ghostbusters 3, possibly as a ghost, are we to really believe her as being truthful or is she just stirring it? My guess is that she's been truthful. It seems entirely plausible to me that the first draft script The Office writers Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky handed in to Sony in October had Murray as a ghost and of course Weaver would know about this. As far as I can tell, The Office scribes are touching up their screenplay with a second draft and casting could be merely a few weeks/months away. Weaver was always known to have a big mouth during interviews. She let out the news very early on (almost three years ago now) in an interview with a French t.v. channel that she was to re-team with James Cameron for Avatar, and this annoucement to British t.v. feels eerily similar to that one. Especially when she casually also confirms that her son Oscar from Ghostbusters II will appear all grown-up, and as a new member of the team. That's something she herself mentioned she wanted to see twelve months ago, and as soon as she did, it became such an obvious choice for Sony, that you can't believe they wouldn't go down that route. My suggestion still lies in Michael Cera on getting the part but Jesse Eisenberg is almost the same kind of actor - he'll do.