10 Iconic Movie Characters Weirdly REPLACED In Movie Sequels

Despite Ghostbusters: Afterlife being an aggressive exercise in fan-service, it was genuinely surprising not to see even a single fleeting glimpse of everybody's famous gluttonous ghost, Slimer.

Slimer is as much an icon of the franchise as any of its human characters, and despite the new film's Summerville, Oklahoma setting, a lot of fans would've loved to see the big green guy roaming around.

Instead, Slimer was very obviously switched out for Muncher, a Slimer-adjacent ghost distinguished by his blue colouring and (admittedly very cool) ability to eat metal and spit it back out in projectile form.

Writer-director Jason Reitman has backed up the notion that he swapped out Slimer for new ghosts who would be native to the area, but in a movie that so shamelessly holds every major piece of Ghostbusters iconography as sacrosanct whether it makes sense or not, this seems like an odd place to draw the line of "restraint."