Dan Aykroyd is returning to the franchise he co-created, this time as an executive producer on “Ghostbusters: Night Shift,” a new 3D-animated series from Netflix and Sony Pictures Animation, according to Deadline’s reporting. The show was previewed at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival in June 2026.

“Night Shift” is set in 1994 New York City, five years after the events of the original 1984 film, following a new crew of “scrappy, young New Yorkers” who take up proton packs after inadvertently causing a supernatural mess of their own.

Key Points

• Dan Aykroyd joins as executive producer on Netflix’s “Ghostbusters: Night Shift,” per Deadline
• Series is produced by Sony Pictures Animation and directed toward a 2027 release
• Jason Reitman and Gil Kenan, directors of the recent live-action “Ghostbusters” sequels, also serve as executive producers, alongside Ben Hibon, Elliott Kalan and Amie Karp
• Story is set in 1994, in the gap between the original films and 2021’s “Ghostbusters: Afterlife”
• First previewed publicly at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival in June 2026

Aykroyd co-wrote and starred in the original 1984 “Ghostbusters” alongside Bill Murray and the late Harold Ramis, and his direct involvement in “Night Shift” gives Netflix’s version a link to the franchise’s earliest creative team that its recent films, built around a new generation of characters, have mostly moved past. Reitman and Kenan bring their own continuity to the project, having steered “Ghostbusters: Afterlife” and “Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire” as the franchise’s most recent theatrical installments.

Setting the series in 1994 fills a gap the films have never addressed on screen: the years between “Ghostbusters II” in 1989 and the franchise’s eventual jump forward to a new generation in “Afterlife.” Rather than revisiting the original team, “Night Shift” hands proton packs to an entirely new, inexperienced crew, described in the show’s logline as “untrained, underappreciated, and kinda sorta responsible for the problem” they end up having to fix, according to trade coverage of the Annecy presentation.

Animation gives the franchise room to do things a live-action budget wouldn’t easily allow, from bigger ghost designs to a wider cast of recurring supernatural threats across a full episodic season. It also lets Netflix build out the Ghostbusters universe without competing directly against Sony’s own theatrical release slate, expanding the property on a separate platform and format entirely.

No premiere date beyond a general 2027 target has been confirmed. For a franchise that has spent much of the last decade rotating between reboots, legacy sequels and cross-generational team-ups, an animated series set in a specific, previously unexplored year gives “Night Shift” a lane of its own, one built on connective tissue rather than another retread of 1984.