Netflix Greenlights First 'Ghostbusters' Cartoon In Decades

'Daily Show' and 'MST3K' alum Elliott Kalan will be showrunner of the series from Sony Pictures Animation

Netflix wasn’t afraid of having a third Ghostbusters cartoon, and after having announced its development in June 2022, has officially greenlit it. No title nor plot details have been revealed yet, however it is a 3D CG series “tonally in line” with the recent Afterlife and Frozen Empire films.

This becomes rather clear upon learning the films’ respective directors and co-writers Jason Reitman and Gil Kenan are executive producing through Ghost Corps, Inc. Elliott Kalan has joined the series as writer, showrunner, and executive producer. He is best known for being the head writer on the Jon Stewart era of The Daily Show for a stretch that included seven consecutive Emmy nominations for best writing for a variety series, resulting in four victories. He later went on to be head writer for Mystery Science Theater 3000’s first revival, two seasons and 20 episodes on Netflix. He also co-hosts the The Flop House podcast and wrote the comic book series Spider-Man and the X-Men.

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Being a Sony franchise, it’s of course going to be from Sony Pictures Animation, which has been getting back into animated series again beginning last year with three series: Agent Elvis which also went to Netflix, Young Love which went to Max, and Open Season: Call of Nature, which first released on Brazilian television before coming stateside on The Roku Channel and Tubi. Before that, they did Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs for Cartoon Network and Hotel Transylvania: The Series for Disney Channel. Production will be handled by Netflix and Ghost Corps, Inc., which is based at Sony’s Columbia Pictures.

This new cartoon brings Ghostbusters back to television and animation for the first time since Extreme Ghostbusters, which ran in syndication in the fall of 1997 for 40 episodes. That series was a sequel to the juggernaut success of The Real Ghostbusters, which starred Frank Welker as Ray Stantz, Maurice LaMarche as Egon Spengler, Lorenzo Music and Dave Coulier as Peter Venkman, and Arsenio Hall and Buster Jones as Winston Zeddemore. It ran for 7 seasons and 140 episodes from 1986-1991, 75 of which were on ABC while a 65 episode syndicated season considered season 2 ran concurrently with season 3. Both Ghostbusters films from Reitman, the son of original film director Ivan Reitman, and Kenan have made $200 million on budgets of $75 million and $100 million respectively.

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Source: Variety