Sony and Netflix are making a Ghostbusters animated movie together, too

The armies of the Ghost Corps are once again on the march, as Deadline reports today that Netflix and Sony Animation are teaming up for a new animated film set in the Ghostbusters universe. This is, as far as we can tell, an entirely separate project from the Ghostbusters animated TV series that is also currently in development at the streamer; we suspect someone looked at the hefty budgets for the last three Ghostbusters movies and asked "Wouldn't it be easier if we just drew all these very hungry/angry dead people instead?"

According to Deadline, the project is still in early development, but Kris Pearn, who co-directed 2013's Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs 2, will be helming the animated feature. (He previously worked with Netflix on 2020's The Willoughbys.) Our big takeaway, meanwhile, is that Netflix is just really in a Ghostbusters mood of late; as we noted above, the streamer has already started development on the cartoon series (which would be the third one to be based on the film franchise, after The Real Ghostbusters and Extreme Ghostbusters), with news of its creation arriving back in August. Someone over there is clearly convinced there's a deep wellspring of Ghostbusters spiritual energy just waiting to be tapped, despite the fact that every single one of the modern movies has crapped out about $200 million and then glumly called it a day. In the spirit of historical continuity—and as an acknowledgement of both the cyclical nature of time, and the fact that your humble Newswire writer has now been working this particular beat for the better part of a decade, and may very well soon be a ghost himself—we will also note that this isn't the first time Sony has floated the idea of a Ghostbusters animated film: Rumors of such a film circulated way back in 2015, around the time Paul Feig's Ghostbusters: Answer The Call was getting ready to shoot.