Anyone who has ever dreamed of being a real-life Ghostbuster now has a chance to do just that, or the closest thing to it, at least—including donning a “Proton Pack” and a jumpsuit, and chasing down spooky apparitions.
On July 1, the New York City location of Madame Tussauds—the famous wax museum filled with celebrity doppelgangers—opened its latest installations to the public, including a virtual reality experience pegged to the new female-led Ghostbusters reboot that opens in theaters later this month.
Madame Tussauds is offering customers access to what it calls the Ghostbusters Experience, an immersive four-room exhibit filled with 3-D effects aimed at making them feel like they’re in the movie, including a subway car filled with ghosts and furniture that moves on its own. Visitors can learn how the Proton Packs from the iconic film series work and can even trap a 3-D “ghost.”
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Additionally, attendees at the museum can pay extra for access to a virtual reality installation, called Ghostbusters: Dimension, where they will “suit up just like a Ghostbuster” in a helmet and proton-pack and a Ghostbusters suit. “They’re entering a New York City apartment that is being invade by ghosts,” Eric Fluet, head of marketing and sales for Madame Tussauds New York told Coins2Day before the installation opened.
As part of that experience, visitors move through different rooms and engage in virtual action straight out of the new movie before a big finale where they try to “save New York” from ghostly foes.
The virtual reality installation stems from a partnership between Madame Tussauds, Sony (whose Columbia Pictures is behind the Ghostbusters movie), and immersive entertainment company The Void, which specializes in creating virtual reality projects.
“We’ve been looking at virtual reality as a technology for a couple of years now,” Fluet told Coins2Day. “We just hadn’t found that right product or right execution for it yet. But, the combination of the Ghostbusters [intellectual property] and the technology that The Void brings to the table with that hyper-reality experience, it was really the right time to jump in.”
The new Ghostbusters hits theaters in the U.S. On July 15. The first two Ghostbusters movies, released in 1984 and 1989, have a large following of sci-fi/comedy film devotees, but the trailers released so far for the 2016 update have been met with some online vitriol. While some fans are upset at the idea of Hollywood rebooting a classic franchise with new characters and writers, there also has seemed to be an element of misogyny in some of the criticisms of a movie that flipped the formula of the original Ghostbusters, which featured male stars, by creating a new movie with all-female leads.
The movie is directed by Paul Feig (Bridesmaids, The Heat) and it stars Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wigg, Kate McKinnon, and Leslie Jones.
