After what feels like a long wait—but really, they’re right on schedule, it’s just that we’re paying SO MUCH attention to this movie—the first trailer for the all-lady Ghostbusters is here, and it’s pretty great.


The basic set up is familiar—ghosts are plaguing New York City, and a group of scientists get together to bust them. It looks like Kristen Wiig and Melissa McCarthy are the de facto leads, and Leslie Jones is filling the role of the team layperson. The trailer makes the point of highlighting that her knowledge is unique and valuable to the team, though, so she hopefully won’t just be an exposition machine for the plot. We only see a glimpse of Chris Hemsworth as the ‘busters’ secretary, but right away, I’m into the inversion of the “hot girl with glasses becomes a geek” trope. There’s a lot of potential in this setup. But my favorite is Kate McKinnon. She has such a cool screen presence—look at her little wink at the one minute mark!—and her character in the movie designed a GHOST BEAR TRAP. I repeat: Ghostbusters 2016 has a GHOST BEAR TRAP.


The piano playing the original Ghostbusters theme at the beginning of the trailer reminds me of the Jurassic World trailer, and I’m not sure if that’s deliberate or not. It could just be the way all the trailers for these “rebootquels” go—invoke the original by including a haunting piano rendition of a famous theme—but it’s interesting that they went with the lesser-known theme over the super famous song. But maybe they’re holding the song back till closer to the actual release. Or maybe they won’t use the song at all, and leave that one piece of classic Ghostbusters “intact” for the man-babies.