Ghostbusters

On the data. Four films in one line, two cartoons alongside it, and one reboot that goes nowhere. The line is 1984, then Ghostbusters II five years later in 1989, then Ghostbusters: Afterlife in 2021 and Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire in 2024, which follow on from each other directly. Afterlife was deliberately built as a second sequel to the 1984 film after the 2016 reboot underperformed, and it treats both earlier films as having happened. On the 2016 film, honestly: it is a complete restart with a different cast playing different characters, it shares no events with any other title, it was set up for a sequel that was never made, and the studio changed direction instead. It is listed here rather than dropped, in its own section, with no position in the story order, because that is what it is: a second attempt at the same premise rather than a chapter of the same story. Nothing in it is required for anything else, and nothing else is required for it. The cartoons are the harder call. The Real Ghostbusters begins from the events of the 1984 film with the same four characters, and one first-season episode has them visit the set of a film being made about them, which is the 1984 film itself. But Ghostbusters II opens with the team disbanded, sued and out of business, and the cartoon's version of the years in between does not allow for that, so the two cannot both be true. It is listed as a continuation of the 1984 film with no place on the film timeline. Extreme Ghostbusters, forty episodes in 1997, is a direct sequel to the cartoon rather than to the films: it is set years later with a new team, Egon and Janine carry over, and the other three originals appear in the two-part finale. Episode counts for The Real Ghostbusters are genuinely contested and the title is flagged accordingly. Wikipedia's own page gives three different figures in three places: 140 episodes plus 33 Slimer! shorts in the infobox, 147 including syndicated episodes and 13 Slimer! episodes in one passage, and 173 including 13 Slimer! episodes in another. Two long-standing fan episode guides break the seven seasons down as 13, 65, 13, 8, then disagree on the fifth season, one giving 15 and the other 22, before agreeing again on 16 and 4. A third guide gives 21 for that season, which is the only breakdown that adds up to the 140 figure most sources quote, so that is the one this site uses: 13, 65, 13, 8, 21, 16 and 4. The Slimer! shorts, which shared an hour-long block with the show from 1988 under the title Slimer! and the Real Ghostbusters, are not counted here and are not listed separately. The show is called The Real Ghostbusters because a rival 1975 live-action series called The Ghost Busters had a prior claim on the plain name. Two Netflix animated projects were announced in early 2026: a series set in the 1990s from Sony Pictures Animation and Flying Bark, executive produced by Jason Reitman and Gil Kenan with Elliott Kalan as showrunner, and a separate animated film directed by Kris Pearn told from a ghost's point of view. Neither has a confirmed title, release date or episode count, and the directors of the recent films have said further live-action sequels are mapped out without any of them being dated, so none of it is listed here.

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