Frozen Empire is at least 4 movies worth of Ghostbusters crammed into one
One thing a lot of fans and critics have said about Ghostbusters Frozen Empire is that it has too many characters with too little focus on each, and too many plotlines for one movie. There have been interviews with the director where it's been said they looked towards The Real Ghostbusters cartoon on how they wanted this movie to feel, but I think they should have made it feel like only ONE episode of Real Ghostbusters. This movie has so much crammed into it that I feel they could have taken any number of scenes and plots from this movie and made it into its own sequel. Spoiler warning for those that haven't seen the new movie yet!
Take the possessor ghost, for instance. In its normal form, the possessor ghost looks kind of like a red orb. But it's constantly possessing things and making them move around. It possesses the lion statue outside the New York Public Library, as well as the Ecto-1 and even a proton pack briefly. This felt very close to an episode of The Real Ghostbusters from season 3, The Copycat. Instead of possessing items, this ghost can copy anything it sees, such as a lamp, a dog, or even one of the ghostbusters! A ghost like the possessor getting free and being able to control anything it touches could have been a pretty solid story for an hour and a half adventure. It could even have possessed the Ecto-1 and proton packs at key moments to make the ghostbusters cause some real damage and take the blame for its mischief!
Something that happens for a very brief time in the movie is Phoebe getting her spirit separated from her body in order to experience being a ghost. It turns out she was tricked and Garraka was able to control her when she was a ghost. This is maybe three minutes of the movie, but I felt they used up a really good plot idea for a full movie right here. There's been a couple of stories where a ghostbuster, usually Egon for whatever reason, is in ghost form for a time. There was an episode where the ghostbusters had to retrieve Egon's spirit from the ghost world and return it to his body, "Egon on the Rampage". There have also been episodes where a ghostbuster has become possessed, like in Mrs. Rogers' Neighborhood, where Watt possesses Peter and almost gets him to free all the ghosts from the containment unit.
The idea of ghosts that don't need to be busted hasn't been brought up too much in the movies but has on occasion been brought up in the cartoons. Pheobe's relationship with Melody, a teen girl ghost, as well as her relationship with Egon's spectral form in Afterlife, have pretty large ramifications for ghostbusters that they could have put more focus on. In the first movie, Ray describes the ghosts being put into the containment unit as 'incarcerated', and in Frozen Empire someone describes the new containment units as jails. It's one thing when you've got malevolent spirits haunting a place, but in Afterlife and Frozen Empire, we see ghosts that retain their humanity for a time before moving on. Should someone be advocating for ghosts' rights? Should there be some investigation done into what kind of haunting they're dealing with before 'incarcerating' them? There have been Real Ghostbusters episodes where they didn't end up busting the ghost, like in 'Ghostbuster of the Year', where they spent a night in a rich dead guy's castle encountering all types of spooky hauntings (the scene where the pool cues and balls form a person and chase Peter used to creep me out). At the end, they realize the ghost was only looking for 'Rosebud', its sled (a nod to Citizen Kane) and once it got it back it moved on.
Another episode, Drool the Dog-Faced Goblin, finds the Ghostbusters encountering a friendly but gross looking ghost, which they insist needs to be trapped even though its caretaker at the sideshow it lives with doesn't want it busted. In the end it sacrifices itself to save the team and they are forced to trap it along with another ghost, so it ends up busted anyway. The idea that they don't always have to bust the ghost is one that could be talked about more, and now that we've had two movies that bring up the concept of ghosts with humanity just needing to finish business, it makes me feel really sorry for that ghost jogger that was just getting some exercise in Ghostbusters II.
So there you have it, just some of the plotlines that I think could have been extracted from Frozen Empire that were worth taking the time to expand into their own fleshed out stories, and various episodes of The Real Ghostbusters that those plots kind of reminded me of. The Real Ghostbusters had a lot of great stories throughout its several seasons, and I think the director was right to look towards them for inspiration, but he should have also paid attention to the fact that each tended to focus on just one thing at a time.
