Creators of Netflix’s ‘Ghostbusters’ Sticks to Canon, Brings the Scary & Funny

The newest addition to the Ghostbusters franchise is a splashy Netflex animated series titled Ghostbusters: Night Shift. Executive Producer Amie Karp said that the big question posed to her by the team was “Can we make an animated series that is in canon?”

The creative team behind Netflix‘s Ghostbusters animated series want their show to “feel like our characters could walk off the television, onto a movie screen and interact with the pre-existing characters.”

Co-showrunner Elliott Kalan, who said Ghostbusters runs through his “internal DNA,” made this his aim. The series is set in New York in 1994. It’s five years after the original Ghostbusters took the Statue of Liberty for a walk, and the Big Apple is no threatened by a new wave of supernatural terror.

“It was about trying to capture the tone of the original movies and newer movies so it feels like our characters could walk off the television, onto a movie screen and interact with the pre-existing characters if they wanted to,” said Kalan in an interview. “The Ghosbusters movies are miracles. They have a very specific tone and they care about the characters, who are so charismatic to be around. We wanted to try to capture that tone in all aspects.”

“We said that if Ghostbusters is going to step back into animation, it had to be as funny as anything you’ve ever seen in Ghostbusters, and as scary as anything you’ve ever seen in Ghostbusters,” said EP Jason Reitman in the same interview.

Ghostbusters legend Dan Aykroyd is on the show as executive producer. Kalan said that having Akroyd’s buy-in on the project was a dream, and hugely powerful and important to the adaptation. Netflix and Sony Pictures Animation both encouraged them to “go weirder, go weirder”.

“Remember the amount of drugs the originators were on when they created this,” said Reitman, who is the son of the late Ivan Reitman, the original Ghostbusters director.

Having spent plenty time watching the original animated shows from the mid-1980s, Reitman said there was a “freedom” to the way the creators approached Ghostbusters back then that his crew wanted to rediscover.

“They were highly inventive, they were strange and they felt this freedom to be odder, funnier and scarier in many ways than the ghosts in the actual films,” he added. “[Co-showrunner] Ben’s [Hibon] first iterations of the concept of the ghosts showed how scary it can be when you use the wilder side of imagination that we don’t see in live action.”

Hibon said “the prerogative was never dumbing down the design” of the ghosts, as he took an “inventive, fleshy and ethereal” approach that “leans into body horror.”

The series is animated by Sony Pictures Animation, and is expected to hit the Netflix streaming service in 2027. An exact release date has not yet been set.