Disney is developing Halloweentown 5, 20 years after the last movie

If you grew up watching Disney Channel in the late ’90s and early 2000s—or you’ve just got a thing for a bit of campy magic—chances are Halloweentown rings a bell. Unlike Disney’s famous The Nightmare Before Christmas (which manages to double as both a spooky and festive flick) or Hocus Pocus (which bombed in cinemas but became a cult hit later on), Halloweentown didn’t even bother with cinemas. Instead, it went straight to telly, quietly parking itself as an October staple in living rooms for a generation. Turns out that’s been enough to power not just one but three sequels, bucketloads of nostalgia, and now, finally, a brand new film heading for development—a whole twenty years since the last one aired. Let’s dive into what’s actually happening, who’s at the wheel, and whether we’ll see familiar faces in Halloweentown 5.

Halloweentown films have racked up over 160 million hours viewed globally on Disney+ alone.

The Original Brew

The very first Halloweentown popped up in October 1998, dropping us straight into the magical chaos of Marnie Piper’s family. Marnie, played by Kimberly J. Brown initially, is your standard American teen—except for the fact she’s a witch descended from the legendary Cromwell line, with a gran who just happens to be Debbie Reynolds as Agatha Cromwell. Agatha whisks her off to the titular Halloweentown; think monsters, spells, and (somewhat shonky) special effects, all mashed together into a world where everything spooky gets a warm, fuzzy Disney twist.

What’s somewhat mad is how the franchise has always skipped theatres entirely, becoming a pure Disney Channel thing. The numbers back up the move—Return to Halloweentown, the series’ fourth entry in 2006, logged a whopping 7.53 million viewers when it premiered, making it the fourth-biggest Disney Channel Original Movie at the time. Even now, the franchise is pulling in enormous streaming numbers; The Wrap reports Halloweentown movies have clocked up over 160 million hours watched on Disney+ globally, and the original broke into the top ten most-watched Halloween titles on the platform this past October.

The Five-Film Spell

• Halloweentown (1998) – 3.38 million viewers
• Halloweentown II: Kalabar's Revenge (2001) – 6.09 million viewers
• Halloweentown High (2004) – 6.14 million viewers
• Return to Halloweentown (2006) – 7.53 million viewers
• Halloweentown 5 (TBA) – in development

So, what’s led to this resurrection? Halloweentown 5 is currently being cooked up by Lily Houghton (Forbidden Fruits) and Ryan Koehn (Gossip Girl) for Disney Channel and Disney+. No one’s confirmed exactly what the new story will be—presumably something that keeps it firmly in the family-friendly spellbook—but Disney’s recent appetite for “legacy sequels” (think: Freaky Friday back for more, The Devil Wears Prada 2 announced, and so on) makes this a logical move. Halloweentown’s comfort-food nostalgia is basically ready-made for Disney+’s current business model, and let’s be blunt—the streaming budget gives it more cash to play with than the old-channel movies ever had.

Worth noting: this isn’t actually a new idea. The prospect of a fifth film first surfaced way back in 2017, when producer Sheri Singer went public with her interest in more Halloweentown. Kimberly J. Brown (OG Marnie) has said she’d love to return, but there’s no casting announced yet. The complication is that the fourth film swapped in Sara Paxton as Marnie, so even if Brown comes back, there’s history to untangle. As for the late Debbie Reynolds, who played the gran everyone wishes they had, her passing back in 2016 sadly rules out any on-screen return.

With the last entry, Return to Halloweentown, marking its twentieth anniversary just two days before this new sequel was announced, Disney is clearly aiming to catch both nostalgia-driven old fans and a fresh batch of younger viewers. What remains to be seen is which cast members get drawn back into the cauldron, and whether the film can conjure the same mix of camp and comfort that’s kept it streaming for decades.