Can Ghostbusters pull off a Lucas/Filoni?
In the early 2000s, in the wake of the commercially successful but critically divisive Star Wars prequels, George Lucas shifted the franchise’s center of gravity away from features and toward animation. Working with Dave Filoni, he helped build a slate of animated series — including The Clone Wars, Star Wars Rebels and The Bad Batch — that deepened the mythology and, over time, became central to the franchise’s canon. Those shows would later prove to be the connective tissue feeding into Disney’s live-action Star Wars universe.
The new animated series Ghostbusters: Night Shift is aiming to do the same for the world of proton packs and wise-cracking parapsychologists. Where Clone Wars bridged the gap between Lucas’ prequels and the original trilogy, Night Shift — which Netflix teased at the Annecy film festival last week — slots into the gap between Ivan Reitman’s 1980s originals and the 2020s sequels Ghostbusters: Afterlife (Jason Reitman) and Gil Kenan’s Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire.” (Paul Feig’s 2016 gender-swapped reboot — a film whose release was overshadowed by a torrent of misogynistic online abuse before disappointing commercially — has been exorcised from the Ghostbusters canon).
