Disney Channel and Disney+ have put a fifth Halloweentown movie into early development, 20 years after the franchise last visited the town where it is Halloween every day.
Lily Houghton and Ryan Koehn are writing the script, which is based on the characters created by Paul Bernbaum, the writer behind the original 1998 film. The project is in early development, with no cast, director or release window announced yet, and further details are still under wraps.
Who Is Writing Halloweentown 5
Houghton co-wrote the screenplay for the horror comedy Forbidden Fruits, which hit theaters earlier this year with Lili Reinhart and Lola Tung and was adapted from her own stage play. She also produced Netflix’s upcoming young-adult horror series The Body, set to premiere next month. Koehn was a staff writer on the Gossip Girl reboot from 2021 to 2023, and his other credits include the thriller The Mad Whale, the TV movie Homeschooled and the crime drama As Night Comes.
Pairing two writers with horror and teen-drama backgrounds tracks with where the franchise has always lived: a family comedy with just enough spooky edge to work in October.
Why Disney Is Going Back Now
The numbers explain the timing. The four Halloweentown films have racked up 160 million hours streamed on Disney+ worldwide, and the original ranked among the service’s ten most-watched Halloween movies last October. Every fall the movies climb back up the charts without any new marketing behind them, which is exactly the kind of built-in audience a streamer likes to see before greenlighting a sequel.
A new installment would join Disney’s seasonal lineup alongside Hocus Pocus, Twitches and Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas. Disney has leaned hard into that collection this month, including bringing Hocus Pocus back to ABC for The Wonderful World of Disney.
The Franchise So Far
Halloweentown premiered on Disney Channel on October 17, 1998, starring Debbie Reynolds as Aggie Cromwell and Kimberly J. Brown as her granddaughter Marnie, a 13-year-old who learns she comes from a line of witches. It spawned Halloweentown II: Kalabar’s Revenge in 2001, Halloweentown High in 2004 and Return to Halloweentown in 2006, the fourth film, which recast Marnie with Sara Paxton after talks with Brown fell apart.
Brown has spent years telling fans she is ready to come back. Earlier this month she said she has told Disney she is down for another one and that the cast would “have a blast.” Reynolds, who played Aggie in all four films, passed away in 2016, so any new movie would have to write around the character who anchored the series.
Whether Houghton and Koehn’s script brings back Brown, the Piper siblings or the original town square is not settled at this stage. Early development means Disney is paying for a script, not yet committing to shoot one.
All four Halloweentown films are streaming on Disney+.
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