‘Halloweentown 5’ Is in Development at Disney, 20 Years After the Last Movie: Everything We Know
Twenty years after the Piper family last stepped through the portal, Disney is quietly building a road back to Halloweentown. A fifth movie in the cult Disney Channel franchise is in early development for Disney Channel and Disney+, according to an exclusive TheWrap report published Thursday, October 22, 2026. Two writers are already on the script, and Disney has a very large number to justify the trip: the four existing films have racked up 160 million hours of viewing on Disney+ worldwide.
For a generation of fans, Halloweentown was the gateway drug, the spooky movie you were allowed to watch before you were allowed to watch the real stuff. So the news lands with a mix of joy and dread. Below we break down everything confirmed, who is writing it, the messy recasting history that still stings, what the streaming numbers really tell us, and the biggest question hanging over the whole thing: who plays Marnie?
Is there a trailer?
Not yet, and there won't be for a while. Halloweentown 5 has no director, no cast and no release window, so there is no official footage to embed. We'd rather show you nothing than a fan-made "concept trailer," so when Disney releases a real teaser, we'll add it here. In the meantime, all four original films are streaming on Disney+.
The details: what's actually confirmed
The confirmed list is short, which is normal for a project this early:
- Status: early development, which means a script is being written but the film has not been formally greenlit for production.
- Home: Disney Channel and Disney+, the same Channel-plus-streaming route the franchise has always lived on.
- Writers: Lily Houghton and Ryan Koehn.
- Source: characters created by Paul Bernbaum, who wrote the 1998 original.
- Not announced: director, cast, plot, title and release date. Nobody has said whether Kimberly J. Brown or Sara Paxton will be involved.
TheWrap also reports that the 1998 original placed among Disney+'s ten most-watched Halloween titles last October. That detail matters more than it looks; we'll come back to it in the numbers section.
Who's behind it
Lily Houghton
Houghton is the more genre-coded half of the writing team. She wrote Forbidden Fruits , the horror comedy starring Lili Reinhart and Lola Tung that hit theaters earlier in 2026, and she's a producer on Netflix's young adult horror series The Body , which TheWrap says premieres next month. That's a résumé built on the same tonal tightrope Halloweentown walks: scary enough to feel dangerous, funny enough to stay fun, and aimed squarely at younger viewers.
Ryan Koehn
Koehn comes from the teen drama side. He was a staff writer on HBO Max's Gossip Girl reboot from 2021 to 2023, and his other credits include the thriller The Mad Whale , the comedic TV movie Homeschooled and the crime drama As Night Comes. Pairing a horror-comedy writer with someone who knows legacy-revival teen TV from the inside reads like a deliberate choice. Disney wants this to scratch the nostalgia itch without shutting out kids who have never heard of Kalabar.
The original creative team
The franchise has always quietly hired genre people. Duwayne Dunham directed the 1998 original. Mary Lambert, the director of 1989's Pet Sematary , took over for Halloweentown II: Kalabar's Revenge in 2001. Mark A.Z. Dippé, who directed 1997's Spawn , made Halloweentown High in 2004, and David Jackson directed Return to Halloweentown in 2006. Whoever gets the director's chair for part five will be following a Stephen King adapter and a comic book splatter guy, which is a funnier lineage than most people realize.
The backstory: 28 years of Halloweentown
The original premiered on Disney Channel on October 17, 1998. Kimberly J. Brown played Marnie Piper, a 13-year-old who discovers she descends from a line of witches and has to start training before her powers fade for good. Debbie Reynolds played her grandmother Aggie Cromwell, with Judith Hoag as Marnie's mother Gwen, Joey Zimmerman as Dylan, Emily Roeske as Sophie and Phillip Van Dyke as the goblin Luke. It was shot in just 24 days in St. Helens and Scappoose, Oregon, on a budget of about $4 million, and it currently sits at 83% on Rotten Tomatoes from a small pool of six critics.
St. Helens never really let go. The town has embraced the film as part of its identity, and D23 held 25th anniversary screenings there on October 21, 2023, in the same theater that appears in the movie.
The sequels came every two to three years. Halloweentown II: Kalabar's Revenge (October 12, 2001) brought in Daniel Kountz as Kal, the vengeful son of the first film's villain. Halloweentown High (October 8, 2004) drew 6.1 million viewers for its premiere and 22.6 million across five airings, and its cast included a pre- High School Musical Lucas Grabeel and a young Finn Wittrock, who would later become an American Horror Story regular.
The recast that fans never forgave
Then came Return to Halloweentown on October 20, 2006, and the franchise's original sin: Marnie was played by Sara Paxton instead of Brown. The movie still did big numbers, with more than 7.5 million viewers at its premiere, but fan memory of it is rough, and Reynolds' reduced role made the change sting more.
Why it happened depends on who you ask. Producer Sheri Singer said in 2017 that the two sides couldn't agree on terms, and in 2024 she claimed Brown's team had asked for unusual perks during negotiations. Brown has told a different story. In a 2018 YouTube video, she said she was available and that Disney simply chose another direction, as SlashFilm recapped. Paxton, for her part, has always been gracious about Brown's performance, and she went on to real horror credibility in The Last House on the Left (2009) and Ti West's The Innkeepers (2011).
The cast has been campaigning for years
The people who made the movies have kept the door open. Van Dyke told E! News in November 2020 that he could be talked into returning if the rest of the cast came back. In September 2024, Brown told Us Weekly she was "totally down for anything," said the cast was on board and that the decision was Disney's, and even floated the idea of Marnie as the mayor of Halloweentown.
The most emotional piece is Aggie. Debbie Reynolds died on December 28, 2016, at 84. Her granddaughter Billie Lourd, promoting American Horror Story at PaleyFest NY on October 8, told PEOPLE she'd love to play a young Aggie in a prequel. "I'm available. I'm so available," she said, as quoted by iHorror. Lourd also said her grandmother took some late-career roles partly so Lourd would have something of hers to watch, and Halloweentown was one of them. The timing of that comment, two weeks before this news broke, is going to fuel a lot of speculation.
By the numbers
- 160 million hours streamed on Disney+ globally across all four films, per TheWrap.
- Top 10: where the 1998 original landed among Disney+'s most-watched Halloween titles last October.
- 7.5 million+ premiere viewers for Return to Halloweentown in 2006.
- 6.1 million premiere viewers and 22.6 million across five airings for Halloweentown High.
- $4 million : the original's budget.
- 20 years since the last installment, and 28 years since the first.
To put 160 million hours in perspective: each film runs roughly 80 to 90 minutes, so that figure works out to well over 100 million full viewings of a Disney Channel movie from the Clinton and Bush years. That is a library title behaving like a hit, every single October, for free (Disney already owns it). Of course the studio wants a new one.
Analysis: what this really means
The obvious comparison is Hocus Pocus 2. Disney waited 29 years to make that sequel, released it straight to Disney+ on September 30, 2022, and watched it pull more than 2.7 billion minutes of viewing in Nielsen's chart for the week of September 26 to October 2, a record for a movie in that weekly chart, beating the 2.2 billion minutes Encanto had posted, as Bloody Disgusting reported at the time. Disney learned a simple lesson: millennial nostalgia plus a family-safe spooky premise equals a streaming event that parents and kids watch together.
But there's a key difference. Hocus Pocus 2 got Bette Midler, Sarah Jessica Parker and Kathy Najimy back in the brooms, and their return was the entire marketing campaign. Halloweentown 's heart was Reynolds, and she's gone. That makes the casting choices on this film more delicate than on almost any legacy sequel. Bring Brown back as an adult Marnie mentoring a new kid witch, and Disney gets the reconciliation story fans have wanted since 2006. Skip her again, and the internet will relitigate the recast before the first trailer finishes.
The other comparison is Disney's own Twitches , which sits next to Halloweentown and Hocus Pocus in the studio's Halloween collection. These "October comfort" movies are essentially a seasonal subscription retention tool: they bring lapsed subscribers back every fall. A brand-new Halloweentown gives Disney+ a fresh anchor for that shelf, and it costs a fraction of a theatrical tentpole.
For horror fans, the stakes are a little different. Kid-friendly horror is a pipeline. A lot of today's adult genre fans started with Marnie, the Goosebumps books or Are You Afraid of the Dark? If this film is made with care, it does the same job for a new generation. Houghton's horror-comedy background is a good sign there. The risk is a glossy, toothless reboot that's more brand extension than spooky story. The originals worked because they were a little weird: a skeleton cab driver, a goblin crush, a town where it's always Halloween. Keep the weird.
What we still don't know
- Is it a sequel, a legacy sequel or a prequel? Lourd's prequel pitch and Brown's "Mayor Marnie" idea point in opposite directions.
- Who directs? No one is attached.
- Will any original cast return? Brown, Paxton, Hoag, Zimmerman, Roeske and Van Dyke are all unconfirmed.
- When? With only a script in progress, Halloween 2027 would be fast. Halloween 2028, the original's 30th anniversary, feels like the natural target, though that's our guess, not Disney's.
- Will it film in St. Helens? Going back to the real town would be the easiest goodwill win available.
Bottom line
Halloweentown 5 is real, early and backed by streaming numbers that make it a no-brainer for Disney. The writing team makes sense, and the cast has been asking for this for years. The whole thing now depends on one decision: whether Disney finally brings back the Marnie fans grew up with. Get that right and this could be the comfort-horror event of its year. Get it wrong and part five inherits the baggage of part four.
So tell us: should Kimberly J. Brown come back as Marnie, or should Disney hand the broom to a brand-new witch?
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Header image: original artwork generated for The Horror Feed with Canva. No studio imagery was used.
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