The news that Ghostbusters: Afterlife's sequel Ghostbusters 4 will arrive in December 2023 makes perfect sense for numerous reasons, not least the impressive box-office performance of its franchise predecessor. Despite myriad delays pushing off the movie's release date by over a year, Ghostbusters: Afterlife proved successful upon its arrival in 2021. While not as critically acclaimed (or financially successful) as Top Gun: Maverick, another nostalgic 80s sequel whose July 2020 release date was pushed off repeatedly, Ghostbusters: Afterlife was still a solid hit with critics and viewers alike.
Ghostbusters: Afterlife earned an impressive $204 million at the box office and boasts a superb 94% audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes, meaning there is evidently an appetite for another franchise installment. As such, it comes as no surprise that Ghostbusters: Afterlife's sequel is set for release in 2023. However, what may surprise viewers is the sequel's release date.
While Ghostbusters: Afterlife was initially intended to be a summer blockbuster, the movie ended up arriving in cinemas in November 2021. Now, Ghostbusters: Afterlife's sequel is set for release in December 2023 and will be set in New York, and this nostalgic setting lines up with the movie's slightly unexpected release date. The original NYC-set Ghostbusters (like the same year's Gremlins) was a huge hit upon its summer release but became a Christmas TV staple in the decades since, thanks to its status as a rare family-friendly horror-comedy. As a result, it makes perfect sense for a Ghostbusters: Afterlife sequel to recreate this formula.
Both Gremlins and Ghostbusters provided a rare combination of laughs and (mild) scares that provided a perfect antidote to the often saccharine offerings of the holiday season. While many Christmas-centric horror movies are too gleefully dark to be mainstream hits thanks to their subversion of the holiday, the surprisingly sweet Ghostbusters: Afterlife was able to hold its own in a crowded winter release schedule precisely because it was a little less sentimental than most Christmas movies and a lot less grim than most holiday horrors. Since Ghostbusters: Afterlife didn't suffer despite being moved from a July release date to a November one and instead arguably ended up performing better than expected in the later slot, the sequel's December 2023 release date is a clever call by the filmmakers.
Ghostbusters: Afterlife pivoted the franchise formula from the buddy comedy of the original movies and toward a more family-centric storyline after the failure of 2016's Ghostbusters remake, which hewed closer to the storyline of the original movies. While this made Ghostbusters: Afterlife feel less like the original Ghostbusters, it also reignited interest in the franchise and makes the sequel's Christmas release all the more reasonable. Now part of a family comedy series (despite its many demons and ghosts), Ghostbusters: Afterlife and its sequel Ghostbusters 4 can capitalize on this tonal shift by doubling down and making the follow-up film a holiday hit once again.