Director Paul Feig has revealed the character names of the brand new Ghostbusters, tweeting out that Melissa McCarthy plays Abby Yates, with Kristen Wiig as Erin Gilbert, Kate McKinnon as Jillian Holtzmann, and Leslie Jones as Patty Tolan.
It’s clear these new players juxtapose the original busting crew that consisted of Dan Aykroyd as Dr. Raymond Stantz, Bill Murray as Dr. Peter Venkman, Harold Ramis as Dr. Egon Spengler, and Ernie Hudson as Winston Zeddmore.
In the film, Erin Gilbert (Wiig) and Abby Yates (McCarthy) play a pair of unheralded authors who write a book positing that ghosts are real. Flash forward a few years and Wiig lands a prestigious teaching position at Columbia U. Which is pretty sweet, until her book resurfaces and she is laughed out of academia.
Gilbert reunites with Yates and the other two proton pack-packing phantom wranglers (Jillian Holtzmann and Patty Tolan), and she gets some sweet revenge when ghosts invade Manhattan and she and her team have to save the world.
The busting begins on July 22, 2016.