Ghostbusters: Afterlife is having one heck of an afterlife.
Last fall’s Ghostbusters sequel — the first to feature the original movies’ cast since 1989 did well enough in theaters to get Sony working on a fifth movie, which was officially announced back in April at CinemaCon. Today, Netflix announced they have their own Ghostbusters project in the works as well: An animated series that will premiere exclusively on the service in the future.
The show will be executive produced by Jason Reitman and Gil Kenan, the writers of Ghostbusters: Afterlife. (Reitman, the son of late Ghostbusters director Ivan Reitman, also directed that film.) Here is how they described the project:
The series is part of the expanding Ghostbusters universe, which began with Ivan Reitman’s Ghostbusters in 1984 and has since become a mega-pop culture phenomenon culminating in last year’s Ghostbusters: Afterlife. As a part of today’s Ghostbusters Day celebration, Reitman and Kenan are expected to reveal more about what audiences can expect from the future of the Ghostbusters franchise.
This will be the third Ghostbusters animated series, following the extremely popular The Real Ghostbusters show of the mid-1980s, which helped cement the popularity of the concept with millions of kids who loved the original movie (and served as the inspiration for that generation’s Ghostbusters toys and slime-colored tie-in beverages), and 1997’s Extreme Ghostbusters, which was a very ’90s update of the same concept, with a mostly new cast of characters and more “extreme” animation. At one point in the mid-2010s, another animated series was announced titled Ecto Force, but that show was eventually shelved. There was also talk around that time of a Ghostbusters prequel series about the original Ghostbusters as kids meeting for the first time.
Netflix loves a TV show based on a popular kids’ brand — just look at all the shows they have based on DreamWorks movies — so Ghostbusters seems like a perfect fit. Now if they could get the license to show the old Real Ghostbusters, that would really be something.
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