Things You May Have Missed in Ghostbusters: Afterlife - Avengers Assemble!

As a result of doing 1,550 Blu-ray framegrabs from Ghostbusters: Afterlife for the Spook Central VIPs, with some extra movie framegrabs and behind-the-scenes images for the Spook Central Facebook page, I became intimately familiar with the movie on a shot-by-shot and frame-by-frame basis. This familiarity has lead me to discover things about the movie that you may have missed from a normal viewing, and thus I am writing a series of articles to present these discoveries to you.

It should be noted that, for the most part, these "Things You May Have Missed in Ghostbusters: Afterlife" articles will not discuss the myriad of references and Easter eggs in the movie, most of which are illustrated in the "We Got One! Easter Eggs Revealed" featurette on the Blu-ray release. Also, it probably doesn't need to be said at this point, but just in case some of you still have not seen the film, let's just say SPOILER WARNING if you read any further. Finally, all images can be clicked on for the original Blu-ray framegrab. Now that all of that is out of the way, let's get to it...

At 31:35 - As his class watches Child's Play, and Podcast tries in vain to pry open a metal Ghost Trap with a wooden ruler, Gary Grooberson (Paul Rudd) is seen reading an Avengers comic book.


That would be Marvel's Ultimate Avengers #4, which was published on November 25, 2009. The book was written by Mark Millar with pencils by Carlos Pacheco, and the official plot synopsis is as follows: "Captain America and the Avengers face-off as the dreaded Red Skull plots universal mayhem! How will Fury's death squad cope with the legend and his son? The world as we know it is on the line!"


The use of the Marvel comic is, likely, a nod to Paul Rudd's connection to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, in which he plays the role of Ant-Man - although the Ant-Man character does not appear in this issue.

Thanks to Peter Lidbetter via Ghostbusters News for the identification.

Join me next time as I look at more Things You May Have Missed in Ghostbusters: Afterlife.