Summary

Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire
receives a franchise-low score of 44% on Rotten Tomatoes.
The movie features original and new cast members, including Bill Murray and Paul Rudd.
It is the second of the franchise’s five movies to earn a Rotten score after 1989’s
Ghostbusters II
.

Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire has hit a franchise low on Rotten Tomatoes. The new movie is a follow-up to the franchise’s 2021 legacy sequel Afterlife and the fifth movie in the horror-comedy franchise overall. It sees many of the surviving members of the original cast (including Bill Murray, Ernie Hudson, Dan Aykroyd, and Annie Potts) reteaming with the Afterlife cast (Finn Wolfhard, Mckenna Grace, Carrie Coon, Paul Rudd, and Logan Kim) and taking on newcomers including Patton Oswalt and Kumail Nanjiani.

Now that reviews for the movie have arrived just a few days before the official Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire release date, the movie has earned its first official critic score via Rotten Tomatoes. With 52 critics weighing in, the movie has a 44% score. Although this number will fluctuate as more reviews are added, at the time of writing the movie has the lowest score of the entire franchise and is only the second installment to earn a Rotten score behind 1989’s Ghostbusters II (55%).

Will Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire’s Rotten Tomatoes Score Affect Its Box Office?

With this grim Rotten Tomatoes result coming in just before the movie’s premiere, the Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire box office could be in deep trouble. While every Ghostbusters movie has earned quite a bit of money at the box office, not all of them can be considered successes. Below, see a comparison of the franchise’s critic and audience scores on Rotten Tomatoes with their worldwide box office results (weighed against their reported budgets):

Title Critics Audience Budget Box Office Ghostbusters (1984) 95% 88% $30 million $295.2 million Ghostbusters II (1989) 55% 61% $40 million $215.4 million Ghostbusters (2016) 74% 49% $144 million $229.1 million Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021) 64% 94% $75 million $204.3 million Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire (2024) 44% TBD $100 million TBD

What this data seems to reveal is that the critic score tends to have more correlation to the relative success of the Ghostbusters movies than the audience’s reactions. Considering the fact that the movie boasts the second-highest budget of the entire franchise, it seems entirely within the realm of possibility that Frozen Empire could lose money. A movie’s break-even point is usually twice its budget or more, meaning that it would probably have to earn at least $200 million just to turn a profit.

If the correlation with these Rotten Tomatoes scores continues and it earns even less than Afterlife, it would seem that Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire release has almost no chance of hitting that $200 million mark. However, Afterlife was released in 2021, a year when the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic made theatrical box office profits much more unpredictable. That could mean that its sequel has a chance to at least match or slightly exceed its gross, though it remains to be seen.

Source: Rotten Tomatoes

Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire continues the story of a new generation of ghost hunters composed of Phoebe (Mckenna Grace), Trevor (Finn Wolfhard) and Podcast (Logan Kim), who received help from the original team in the previous movie. Paul Rudd returns as Gary Grooberson and franchise co-creator Ivan Reitman returns to write and produce.Director Gil Kenan Release Date March 22, 2024 Studio(s) Columbia Pictures , Bron Creative , Ghost Corps , Right of Way Films Distributor(s) Sony Pictures Releasing Writers Jason Reitman , Gil Kenan Runtime 115 Minutes