Ghostbusters: Night Shift Unveils Footage at Annecy
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- Ghostbusters: Night Shift is set in New York in 1994, five years after the original film's Statue Liberty walk, and launches on Netflix next year.
- The series debuted its first footage at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival during a "Next on Netflix" presentation.
- Elliott Kalan and Ben Hibon serve as co-showrunners, with EPs Jason Reitman, Gil Kenan, Amie Karp, and Dan Aykroyd — the original Ghostbusters legend.
- The team's stated goal is strict canon fidelity so characters could "walk off the television, onto a movie screen and interact with the pre-existing characters," per Kalan.
- Gil Kenan said the crew aimed to revive horror in animation, calling the genre "under utilized" in the medium and noting "animation is a perfect medium for horror."
- Co-showrunner Ben Hibon designed the ghosts with an "inventive, fleshy and ethereal" approach that "leans into body horror," rejecting any temptation to "dumb down" the designs.
- Netflix and Sony Pictures Animation actively encouraged the team to "go weirder, go weirder" — a directive Reitman half-jokingly attributed to "the amount of drugs the originators were on."
Why it matters: For Netflix, anchoring a flagship animated series to a 40-year-old franchise with active live-action continuity is a bet that nostalgia IP can anchor its animation slate. For Sony, having both Reitman (son of original director Ivan Reitman) and Aykroyd executive producing signals the studio wants the animated and live-action Ghostbusters universes to feel like one continuous world rather than competing interpretations.
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