I hope you don’t have too much nostalgia for The Real Ghostbusters, as Netflix’s newly greenlit animated Ghostbusters series probably won’t be much like it.
As reported by Variety, Netflix has finally greenlit its Ghostbusters animated series that’s been in the works since at least 2022. According to sources that spoke with Variety, Elliott Kalan has joined the project as writer and executive producer. Kalan sounds like a pretty good fit for a series like Ghostbusters, given that he was the head writer for the 2017 version of Mystery Science Theater 3000, and has previously written for various comics too – he’s the guy that wrote that frequently memed Spider-Man comic where there’s an anthropomorphic pterodactyl who could cure cancer, but just wants to turn people into dinosaurs.
Details about this new animated Ghostbusters show are very slim, but those of you that loved the ’80s classic The Real Ghostbusters and its 2D animation might be disappointed to hear that this outing will be a 3D one. Variety also notes that sources say the show will be tonally in line with the more recent Ghostbusters films, so don’t expect any of that classic SNL-cast humour.
Co-writers of the two newer Ghostbusters films, Afterlife and Frozen Empire, Jason Reitman and Gil Kenan are also attached to the show as executive producers, so it being closer to these titles in tone isn’t particularly surprising.
This animated series will actually be the third the franchise has received, as a few years after The Real Ghostbusters finished, Extreme Ghostbusters was released, though this one didn’t do nearly as well as the original. It was also the last entry in the franchise until the 2016 Ghostbuster reboot, which was obviously again soft-rebooted in 2021 with Afterlife, a direct sequel to 1989’s Ghostbusters 2.
Afterlife did pretty well at the box office, taking home $204 on a $75 million budget, but this year’s Frozen Empire didn’t do quite as well, achieving a box office result of $202 million on a $100 million budget. We’ll have to see if the Ghostbusters aren’t heading to the afterlife themselves before this animated series releases.
