Movies
Disney’s ‘Haunted Mansion’ Movie Conjures Up a New Summer 2023 Release Date
Disney’s new live action Haunted Mansion movie has been bumping around the release calendar for a while now, most recently scheduled to haunt theaters on August 11, 2023.
But that date has been changed, Bloody Disgusting has learned this afternoon. The popular Disney attraction will now be heading back to movie theaters on July 28, 2023.
Justin Simien (Dear White People, Bad Hair) is directing the new live action adaptation of the popular, long-running Disney theme park attraction that’s home to 999 haunts.
LaKeith Stanfield, Tiffany Haddish, Owen Wilson, Rosario Dawson, and Danny DeVito star, with Jamie Lee Curtis as Madame Leota and Jared Leto as the Hatbox Ghost.
Winona Ryder, Dan Levy, and Hasan Minhaj will also appear in the new movie.
“In this mysterious adventure, a doctor (Dawson) and her 9-year-old son (Chase Dillon), looking to start a new life, move into a strangely affordable mansion in New Orleans, only to discover that the place is much more than they bargained for. Desperate for help, they contact a priest (Wilson), who, in turn, enlists the aid of a widowed scientist-turned failed-paranormal expert (Stanfield), a French Quarter psychic (Haddish) and a crotchety historian (DeVito).”
The dark ride attraction, which launched in 1969 and is still going strong today at Disney parks, “sees theme park guests go inside a spooky and creepy manor that has a wide array of supernatural frights. It also features a graveyard’s worth of characters.” The most popular characters include Hatbox Ghost, Madame Leota, The Phantom and the Hitchhiking Ghosts.
Rob Minkoff directed the feature film The Haunted Mansion back in 2003, the first big screen adaptation of the ride. Eddie Murphy starred in the film. More recently, Guillermo del Toro was attached to adapt the ride for a brand new movie. Alas, it never came to life.
Katie Dippold (Ghostbusters 2016) is writing the new movie’s script for Disney.
Universal has been having a hell of a time getting their Universal Monsters brand back on a better path in the wake of the Dark Universe collapsing, with four movies thus far released in the years since The Mummy attempted to get that interconnected universe off the ground.
First was Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man, to date the only post-Mummy hit for the Universal Monsters, followed by The Last Voyage of the Demeter, Renfield, and now Abigail. The latter three films have attempted to bring Dracula back to the screen in fresh ways, but both Demeter and Renfield severely underperformed at the box office. And while Abigail is a far better vampire movie than those two, it’s unfortunately also struggling to turn a profit.
Where does the Universal Monsters brand go from here? The good news is that Universal and Blumhouse have once again enlisted the help of Leigh Whannell for their upcoming Wolf Man reboot, which is howling its way into theaters in January 2025. This is good news, of course, because Whannell’s Invisible Man was the best – and certainly most profitable – of the post-Dark Universe movies that Universal has been able to conjure up. The film ended its worldwide run with $144 million back in 2020, a massive win considering the $7 million budget.
Given the film was such a success, you may wondering why The Invisible Man 2 hasn’t come along in these past four years. But the wait for that sequel may be coming to an end.
Speaking with the Happy Sad Confused podcast this week, The Invisible Man star Elisabeth Moss notes that she feels “very good” about the sequel’s development at this point in time.
“Blumhouse and my production company [Love & Squalor Pictures]… we are closer than we have ever been to cracking it,” Moss updates this week. “And I feel very good about it.”
She adds, “We are very much intent on continuing that story.”
At the end of the 2020 movie, Elisabeth Moss’s heroine Cecilia Kass uses her stalker’s high-tech invisibility suit to kill him, now in possession of the technology that ruined her life.
Stay tuned for more on The Invisible Man 2 as we learn it.
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