A fresh plan has emerged for a Ghostbusters animated movie, to add to another live action film and a TV show as well.
According to a new report over at Deadline, Sony has put an animated feature-length take on Ghostbusters into active development. Over in the live action department, the director of this year’s Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, Gil Kenan, has publicly said that discusions are happening about a third film in the series. Plus there’s a small screen take being developed at Netflix too.
However, Sony has reportedly put this animated project into development with the idea of doing for the ghostbusting franchise what the Spider-Verse films have done for its library of Spider-Man characters. The two animated films that have released thus far aren’t just big moneymakers: they are heavily adored by critics and audiences alike.
Tackling the multiverse in animated form really allowed the creators behind the Spider-Verse films to go creatively wild, both visually and narratively and the results clearly speak for themselves. Perhaps Sony’s rationale here is sound: with a Ghostbusters movie being given the same creative leeway, perhaps we could get the kind of story we haven’t really seen before in the series’ deades-long history.
Warner Bros has taken a similar route to leveraging beloved franchise material with its recent animated spin-off, The Lord Of The Rings: The War Of The Rohirrim. Our reviewer James was less enthused about this effort though, stating, ‘the business case for a film so obviously outweighs its artistic merit it proves too distracting to ignore.’
Hopefully Sony has caught wind of that film’s fairly middling response and understands that as with the Spider-Verse films, animation should be partnered with creative risk to give audiences a fresh spin on a long-standing series rather than something they’ve already seen in live action.
We’ve put out our own thoughts on the direction the live action films should head in and you can read them right here, (and also here) but on paper at least, an animated film seems like a sound idea. Kris Pearn is currently attached to direct and as you might guess from the lack of details present here, plot details are being kept tightly under wraps. We’ll bring you more on this one as and when we hear it.
