Ghostbusters Franchise: Every Movie, Cartoon and Game in Order (2026 Guide)

Ghostbusters carried a reported budget of about $30 million and earned about $296.6 million worldwide in 1984. Forty-two years later, the franchise's next official chapter is not a movie at all. It is an animated Netflix series called Ghostbusters: Night Shift, due in 2027. That contrast tells the whole story of the Ghostbusters franchise: a comedy that beat Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom at the American box office, followed by decades of false starts, one divisive reboot, two legacy sequels that never matched the original, and a retreat to streaming.

This guide covers every Ghostbusters movie, cartoon, game and comic in order, with the budgets, box office totals and review scores that explain how the brand got here. It also sets out what is confirmed about Night Shift and where a sixth film stands as of September 2026. Think of it as five calls, plus the calls that never connected.

Ghostbusters movies at a glance

Across the five films the franchise has earned roughly $1.15 billion worldwide on about $386 million in reported budgets. It crossed the billion-dollar line with Frozen Empire in March 2024, not Afterlife: the first four films totaled about $946 million. Since the original, every installment has landed between $202 million and $229 million, and the 2016 reboot got there at nearly four times the cost of the 1989 sequel. Budgets are reported estimates, and Wikipedia's infoboxes give ranges for the first two films. The $296.6 million for the original is Box Office Mojo's figure, while Wikipedia's film page puts the total near $370 million once later re-releases are counted.

Call No. 1: Ghostbusters (1984)

Dan Aykroyd conceived Ghostbusters as a vehicle for himself and John Belushi. His first script was enormous, with teams traveling through time, space and other dimensions. Director Ivan Reitman saw the budget problem immediately and pushed for a rewrite, which Aykroyd and Harold Ramis finished in a Martha's Vineyard bomb shelter. When Belushi died, Bill Murray took the lead role, and Belushi's likeness became the starting point for the design of Slimer.

Released June 8, 1984, the film starred Murray, Aykroyd, Ramis, Ernie Hudson, Sigourney Weaver, Rick Moranis and Annie Potts. It grossed roughly $243.6 million in North America and $53 million overseas on a $30 million budget, and it held No. 1 at the American box office for seven straight weekends, well ahead of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. The American Film Institute ranks it 28th on its list of the greatest comedies, and it holds a 95% Rotten Tomatoes score, the franchise's best by far. The Library of Congress selected it for the National Film Registry in 2015.

The film also fixed the franchise's gear: proton packs to subdue ghosts, ghost traps to contain them and P.K.E. meters to find them. Then there was the song. Ray Parker Jr. wrote the theme in about a day and a half, and it sat at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 for three weeks and earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Song.

The film's footprint outgrew its box office. The Art Deco co-op at 55 Central Park West, which stood in for Dana Barrett's apartment building, is still known as the Ghostbusters Building, "Who ya gonna call?" and "I ain't afraid of no ghost" slipped into everyday speech, and fans who call themselves Ghostheads keep the brand alive.

Call No. 2: Ghostbusters II (1989)

Aykroyd, Ramis and Reitman were reluctant to make a sequel because they considered the first film self-contained, but Columbia Pictures pressed for more after the movie and the animated series both took off. Ghostbusters II arrived June 16, 1989, set five years after the original. The team has lost its credibility over the property damage it caused, until a river of ectoplasmic slime under the city starts feeding on New York's negative emotions.

The returning cast gained Peter MacNicol and Wilhelm von Homburg, who played the villain Vigo the Carpathian. The sequel made about $215.4 million worldwide on a $37 million budget, with $112.5 million of that from North America, and it holds a 57% Rotten Tomatoes score. It also produced two soundtrack singles: Bobby Brown's "On Our Own" and a rap version of the theme from Run-D.M.C.

The Real Ghostbusters and Extreme Ghostbusters

Between the first two films, the brand became a Saturday-morning staple. The Real Ghostbusters debuted September 13, 1986, produced by Columbia Pictures Television and DIC Entertainment and created by Ramis and Aykroyd. The words "The Real" were added because Filmation already owned a cartoon called Ghostbusters. The show ran seven seasons and roughly 140 episodes and earned an Emmy nomination. In 1988 it was retitled Slimer! and the Real Ghostbusters, adding short segments starring the green mascot.

Extreme Ghostbusters followed in September 1997 as a 40-episode sequel series. It put a team of college-aged Ghostbusters under the leadership of veteran Egon Spengler, and some TV listings ran it as Ghostbusters Dark. Both cartoons sit in their own animated continuity.

The lost decades: Ghostbusters III

For roughly twenty-five years, a third movie kept almost happening. In the 1990s Aykroyd wrote Ghostbusters III: Hellbent, which sent the team to a hellish alternate Manhattan called Manhellton. It was designed to hand the torch to a younger cast, with Peter Venkman written out. By 2002, Columbia worried about the cost.

A 2008 script from Gene Stupnitsky and Lee Eisenberg followed, then a 2012 rewrite by Etan Cohen. Murray publicly joked he would only return if his character died in the first reel. Then Harold Ramis died on February 24, 2014, and Reitman stepped back from directing. That collapse opened the door for Paul Feig's reboot, and pieces of Hellbent survived in the 2009 video game.

Call No. 3: Ghostbusters (2016)

Paul Feig turned down a sequel built on passing the torch and pitched a reboot instead. Ghostbusters opened July 15, 2016, in a separate continuity, with Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, Leslie Jones and Kate McKinnon as the team and Chris Hemsworth as their receptionist. Aykroyd, Murray, Weaver, Hudson and Potts all made cameos. On home media it was rebranded Ghostbusters: Answer the Call to separate it from the original.

The film earned $229.1 million worldwide on a reported $144 million budget, the largest production cost in the series, and The Hollywood Reporter estimated a loss of about $70 million. Critics were kinder: it holds a 74% Rotten Tomatoes score, better than either legacy sequel. A follow-up never materialized. The reboot did, however, launch Ghost Corps, the Sony banner formed in 2015 with Reitman and Aykroyd overseeing the brand's expansion.

Call No. 4: Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021)

Sony reset with a direct sequel. Ghostbusters: Afterlife, released November 19, 2021, was directed by Jason Reitman, Ivan's son, and co-written with Gil Kenan. Ivan Reitman produced. A single mother and her children inherit a farm in Oklahoma from her estranged father, Egon Spengler, and discover he spent his final years trying to prevent an apocalypse. Mckenna Grace, Finn Wolfhard, Carrie Coon and Paul Rudd led the cast, and Murray, Aykroyd, Hudson, Potts and Weaver returned in supporting roles. Ramis, who died in 2014, appeared through his likeness.

The film opened to about $44 million and finished with $204.4 million worldwide on a $75 million budget. Reviews were mixed at 63% on Rotten Tomatoes, though audiences gave it an A-minus CinemaScore. Its return of about 2.7 times its budget was the best of any film in the series since 1989.

Call No. 5: Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire (2024)

Kenan took over as director for Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, released March 22, 2024. The Spengler family moves back to the New York firehouse, where the original team has built a secret research lab. An ancient artifact unleashes an evil force that threatens a second Ice Age. Kumail Nanjiani and Patton Oswalt joined the returning cast, and a post-credits scene teased the Mini-Pufts. Murray, Aykroyd, Hudson, Potts and William Atherton's Walter Peck all appeared in supporting roles, and the villain Garraka was voiced by Kenan himself.

The film opened around $45 million, which pushed the franchise past $1 billion worldwide. It finished at $202 million on a $100 million budget, the lowest total in the series, and its 41% Rotten Tomatoes score is also the franchise low. Audiences were warmer, with a B-plus CinemaScore, but the numbers were not the kind that produce a fast sequel.

Games, comics, theme parks and merchandise

Ghostbusters has always been a multimedia business. Activision released the first game in 1984 for the Commodore 64, and the games have kept coming: Ghostbusters: The Video Game (2009) from Terminal Reality, the asymmetrical multiplayer title Spirits Unleashed from IllFonic (October 18, 2022) and the VR game Rise of the Ghost Lord from nDreams (2023).

In print, IDW published a long-running comic series, and Dark Horse released Ghostbusters: Back in Town in 2024, set between Afterlife and Frozen Empire, followed by Dead Man's Chest in 2025. Universal Studios Florida ran the Ghostbusters Spooktacular from 1990 to 1996. Merchandise sales had passed $1 billion by 2007. And the real Hook & Ladder Company 8 firehouse in New York remains a tourist stop, where fans gather every June for Ghostbusters Day.

Ghostbusters: Night Shift (2027)

The franchise's next official project is a Netflix and Sony Pictures Animation series. It was announced in June 2022, greenlit in August 2024 with Elliott Kalan as writer and executive producer, and animated by Flying Bark Productions. Netflix revealed the title on June 6, 2026, at the Hook & Ladder 8 firehouse on Ghostbusters Day, then showed a first look at the Annecy animation festival on June 24. A 2027 release, exclusively on Netflix, is confirmed. An exact date, trailer and episode count are not.

The official logline places the story in New York in 1994, five years after the Ghostbusters took the Statue of Liberty for a walk, with a group of scrappy young New Yorkers forced to put on proton packs and bust ghosts. That makes it a story set between the original films and Afterlife, not a prequel. TheWrap reports the team describes it as fully in canon, unlike The Real Ghostbusters, and set during Walter Peck's original run for mayor. Jason Reitman and Gil Kenan are executive producers alongside Aykroyd and Amie Karp, and Ben Hibon and Kalan run the show.

The presentation revealed a five-person team: Belladonna the goth, Mitzi the punk, Zoe the kid, Travis the con man and Mike the scientist. Jack Quaid is reportedly voicing Travis, though Netflix has not publicly named him. The gear looks homemade, including a PKE meter built from PlayStation 1 parts and a customized van called Ecto-94, and the creators promised real scares. The footage shown featured a demonic conductor in Grand Central Terminal.

Reitman told the Annecy audience the show can only be told in animation and pushes the envelope on comedy and, more importantly, scares. The new heroes move into a run-down Tribeca firehouse and share it with a "Terror Puppy" modeled on the original Terror Dogs, and the look is deliberately grimy and do-it-yourself, inspired by 1990s punk.

Is Ghostbusters 6 happening?

Not officially. As of September 2026, Sony has not greenlit a sequel to Frozen Empire. In October 2024, Kenan said he and Reitman were continuing the conversation about telling big Ghostbusters stories on the big screen, but no new film has been announced. Mckenna Grace said in March 2026 that nobody had shared any updates with her, though she would gladly play Phoebe Spengler again.

Deadline reported in December 2024 that a separate animated Ghostbusters film was in early development at Sony Pictures Animation and Netflix, with Kris Pearn attached to direct. An industry insider reported the working title Ecto and a ghost's-eye premise, but that has not been confirmed. Some outlets read the pivot to animation as a sign that Sony doubts the live-action model after Frozen Empire. Sony has said nothing to that effect.

Ghostbusters movies in order

For a straightforward release-order marathon, watch Ghostbusters (1984), Ghostbusters II (1989), Ghostbusters (2016), Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021) and Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire (2024). For story order in the main continuity, skip the 2016 film, which takes place in an alternate universe, and slot Night Shift between the second film and Afterlife when it arrives: 1984, 1989, Night Shift (set in 1994), Afterlife, Frozen Empire.

Ghostbusters franchise FAQ

What is at stake for the Ghostbusters franchise

Night Shift carries more weight than a normal spin-off. The original earned about $296.6 million in 1984 dollars, and none of the four films since has topped $230 million worldwide. Night Shift is the first new Ghostbusters story since 2024, and it will show whether a younger, scarier and rougher version of the brand can bring back an audience that let the last two movies land near $200 million. No other Ghostbusters project currently has a confirmed release year, so the whole pipeline rides on this one. If it works, Ghostbusters 6 gets a stronger case. If it stalls, the proton packs may stay in the firehouse a little longer.