Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire Quietly Set Up Gozer's Return 110 Years Before It Can Happen

Summary Gozer could be on the loose after Garraka breaks the containment unit in Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire's ending.

Ghostbusters: Afterlife revealed Gozer can't return until 2134, so the team may not have to worry about her escaping.

Ghostbusters 6 could bring back Gozer using ghost walking technology without releasing her, paying tribute to the original villain.

Warning: This post contains SPOILERS for Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire

While Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire didn’t include an appearance by the franchise’s original villain, Gozer, the sequel did set up a comeback for this iconic figure. Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire is a follow-up to 2021’s Ghostbusters: Afterlife that continues the story of the eponymous Ghostbusters as they take on their most lethal foe yet. Both the original team and the new generation join forces to fight Garraka, a demonic evil entity that releases the team’s many captured ghosts from containment at the movie’s climax. Although Garraka is eventually overpowered by the heroes, destroying the containment unit could have unintended consequences.

In Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire’s ending, Phoebe’s ghost friend Melody helps Garraka escape by using Phoebe to recite a ritual chant while she is astral projecting. Melody eventually redeems herself when she turns on Garraka and helps the Ghostbusters, earning her passage into the afterlife as a result. The thing is, Garraka breaks the team’s containment unit before the villain is defeated, and the Ghostbusters spend the end of the movie searching for the escaped ghouls. While Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire has many Easter eggs referencing earlier franchise outings, the movie’s ending never mentions one particularly dangerous villain from that unit.

Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire's Broken Containment Unit Could Mean Gozer Is Free

The iconic Ghostbusters villain may have escaped from containment

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The original Ghostbusters villain, Gozer, was captured in Ghostbusters: Afterlife’s ending, so it is possible Gozer was placed in the old containment unit and escaped in Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire’s ending. Although Winston's engineers built a new ghost containment unit, many memorable monsters like Slimer, the Sewer Dragon, and the Mini-Pufts were contained in the unit that Garraka broke. As such, Gozer could be on the loose too. This would be terrible news for the heroes, since Gozer is one of the most powerful beings they ever faced. That said, she is also one of the only villains they have defeated more than once.

As such, it is possible that the Ghostbusters were able to recapture Gozer without coming as close to an apocalypse as last time. The fact that Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire’s mid-credits scene focuses on the Mini-Pufts rather than Gozer proves that the demon's return wasn’t as big an issue for the team as Gozer proved in the climax of the original Ghostbusters. This fits with Gozer’s depiction in Ghostbusters: Afterlife, where the veteran members of the team knew how to defeat her. Although the team did struggle, they were a lot more confident than they had been in the original movie.

Ghostbusters: Afterlife Revealed Gozer Can't Return Until 2134

The apocalypse timeline is connected to Gozer's emergence

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As such, it would make sense if Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire’s version of the team were even more self-assured about defeating Gozer. This is also reflected in the movie’s own lore, since Ghostbusters: Afterlife’s apocalypse timeline revealed that Gozer can’t return until 2134. When Phoebe read the inscriptions in the cave that contained the entity, she realized these were years when Gozer would return to life. The next number after 1984 and 2021 was 2134, meaning the team won’t have to worry about Gozer returning to her full strength for some time. This means she may not have even escaped containment.

After all, Winston’s new containment unit would presumably have been used to house the most dangerous entities first. As such, Gozer might have been moved to Winston’s facility before Slimer or the Mini-Pufts, meaning she may not even have gotten out in the sequel’s ending. Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire needed to drop Gozer to help ensure that the franchise wasn’t always looking back to the past, so not bringing her back after Garraka’s defeat was a canny decision. Revealing that she was safely housed in Winston’s containment unit would also lend more credibility to his slicker, better-financed facility.

How Ghostbusters 6 Can Bring Gozer Back Without Breaking The Franchise

They could ghost walk to her dimension

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If Ghostbusters 6 were to reveal that Gozer has returned, the sequel would need to either contradict the franchise’s own canon or jump ahead to the far future. However, there is one way that Gozer can now come back without the movies needing to rewrite their story. Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire’s Phoebe ghost walked to Melody’s dimension so she could spend time with her, only to be fooled by the duplicitous ghost. The team could use the same technology to visit Gozer in Ghostbusters 6, thus bringing the character back without releasing her.

It is important that the series doesn’t release Gozer again since the character’s villainous potential has been spent through her two movies. However, if the team needed her expertise to defeat another villain, then ghost walking could be a perfect, appropriately creepy way for them to make contact with the Sumerian deity. This would be a nice nod to Gozer, and it could allow Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire's follow-up to pay tribute to the original series villain without her necessarily needing to take over the sequel’s story.