Disney Reportedly Heads Back to ‘Halloweentown’ With New Movie in the Works

By helitra·October 28, 2026·2 min read

Disney is heading back to Halloweentown, with a fifth film in the franchise reportedly in early development.

According to TheWrap, which first reported news of the project on Thursday (October 22), Lily Houghton and Ryan Koehn are writing a script built around the characters Paul Bernbaum created for the 1998 original.

Houghton most recently wrote the horror comedy Forbidden Fruits, starring Lili Reinhart and Lola Tung, and produced Netflix’s YA horror series The Body, which premieres next month. Koehn spent 2021 to 2023 on the writing staff of the Gossip Girl reboot.

The first Halloweentown film introduced 13-year-old Marnie Piper, who learns she comes from a long line of witches. Three sequels followed: Halloweentown II: Kalabar’s Revenge in 2001, Halloweentown High in 2004, and Return to Halloweentown in 2006.

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The last film pulled 7.5 million total viewers on debut, the most-watched basic cable program of the day and, at the time, the fourth most-watched Disney Channel original movie ever.

All four films live on Disney+, where the franchise has logged 160 million hours globally, and the 1998 original landed among the platform’s 10 most-watched Halloween titles last October alongside Hocus Pocus, Twitches, and Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas.

The late Debbie Reynolds, who died in 2016, anchored the four original movies as grandmother Agatha Cromwell. Kimberly J. Brown played Marnie in the first three films before Sara Paxton took over for Return to Halloweentown, a swap that drew widespread criticism.

Who plays Marnie in the upcoming movie is yet to be decided, though Brown has said she would be interested in returning to the role. Phillip Van Dyke, who played the goblin Luke in the first two films, told E! in 2020 that he would come back if the rest of the cast did, too.