This June 8 was Ghostbusters Day — no, really, it’s a thing — and Sony celebrated the occasion by delivering what has to be the biggest Ghostbusters news explosion ever. The studio’s attempts to revitalize the iconic 1980s supernatural comedy franchise didn’t get off to an auspicious start with 2016’s Answer the Call reboot, but 2021’s Ghostbusters: Afterlife went down a lot better with fans.
Apparently Sony is pleased enough with it to move forward with a range of Ghostbusters projects. Franchise co-creator and Ray Stantz himself, Dan Aykroyd is spearheading three new pieces of GB media through his Ghost Corps production company, with each of them set to operate in a different corner of the universe and in a different medium to boot.
Keep reading for everything we know so far about this trio of projects that might just mark the beginning of a Ghostbusters Cinematic Universe. There’s about to be a lot of strange somethings in the neighborhood…
Ghostbusters: Afterlife sequel
First of all, in unsurprising news, Ghostbusters: Afterlife is getting a sequel. The fourth GB film overall acted as an honorary Ghostbusters 3 as the legacy follow-up brought back the OG team, including Harold Ramis’ Egon as a CGI specter, as well as introducing the next generation of busters in Egon’s grandkids Phoebe (McKenna Grace), Trevor (Finn Wolfhard), and their friends.
The other innovation of Afterlife was the creative decision to move the action from New York to the sleepy Oklahoma town of Summerville. Now that they’ve tried that experiment, however, it’s back to basics for the next movie. The Afterlife sequel announcement confirms it will take place in NYC once again, with the film’s working title, Firehouse, making clear that it’ll be based around the team’s legendary HQ.
Afterlife director Jason Reitman and his co-writer Gil Kenan are currently penning the script, so we’d expect it to follow on from the last movie’s final scene, which revealed that Winston Zeddemore (Ernie Hudson) is now a rich CEO who has ambitions to relaunch the Ghostbusters in a big way. No casting details have yet to be unveiled.
Netflix animated series
The Ghostbusters are returning to animation! For fans of a certain age, 1980s cartoon The Real Ghostbusters is iconic as the original 1984 movie, while those who grew up in the ’90s might fondly remember The Extreme Ghostbusters. It looks like kids of the 2020s are about to get their own Ghostbusters cartoon, too, as a new animated series is headed to Netflix.
According to the announcement, this unnamed series will “create the next generation of Ghostbusters.” This might indicate that it will take place in the present-day, but it actually sounds like the show could be set in some other time period, as the official description notes that it “will navigate an unexplored era of the Ghostbusters Canon.”
It’s worth pointing out that, back in 2015, Sony announced Ghostbusters: Ecto Force, an animated series set in 2050 and following a futuristic group of Ghostbusters. Nothing ever came of that at the time, but could this Netflix show be a revamp of the same concept?
Animated spinoff movie
In addition to the new live-action movie and cartoon series, an animated film is likewise in the works. This Ghostbusters spinoff will be helmed by Jennifer Kluska (Hotel Transylvania: Transformania) and Chris Prynoski (Metalocalypse) and written by How I Met Your Mother scribe Brenda Hsueh. Apparently, this one will feature “all new characters” and offer “a whole new take” on the franchise.
Although we don’t have any specific plot details about this project, maybe we can again look to previous aborted spinoffs for some pointers. Alongside Ecto Force, another cancelled project announced in 2015 was an animated film that would tell a story from the point of view of the ghosts, not the busters. Could this be “the new take” that’s teased in the above tweet?
In addition to these three movie and TV projects, Gil Kenan has promised that the Ghostbusters brand will continue to expand in other media, such as games and comic books, too. As the GB Twitter account put it, “There’s so much story that has never been told.”
‘Busting has never felt so good.
