Hannah covers horror, sci-fi, and games at Collider, where she writes news and features, reviews new releases, and interviews the people who make them. She’s helping build out Collider’s gaming coverage, with Pokémon as one of her specialties. If she isn’t writing about a monster, she’s probably watching one on a tape from her VHS collection.
Disney Channel gave an entire generation some fairly unreasonable expectations about Halloween. Finding out your grandmother was a witch meant getting to follow her home to a town full of monsters, where being obsessed with the holiday was completely normal. Halloweentown understood the appeal immediately, and Debbie Reynolds made a very convincing argument for sneaking onto that bus.
The original movie was released in 1998 and introduced Kimberly J. Brown as Marnie Piper and Reynolds as her grandmother, Aggie Cromwell. Three sequels followed, taking Marnie from discovering her powers to attending college at Witch University. But the movies stopped in 2006, leaving the franchise without a new installment for two decades.
That could finally change. TheWrap reports that a fifth Halloweentown movie is in early development at Disney Channel and Disney+, with Lily Houghton and Ryan Koehn developing the screenplay. The new movie will use the characters created by Paul Bernbaum, although Disney has yet to reveal what would bring the Cromwell family back together. Houghton comes to the project after writing Forbidden Fruits, this year’s horror comedy starring Lili Reinhart and Lola Tung, while Koehn’s credits include working as a writer on the Gossip Girl reboot. With the script still in development, there is no release date to put on the calendar, and the biggest question for longtime fans remains unanswered: Who is playing Marnie?
Four decades, four completely different ideas of what music was even for. Here is the one you were built for, what it would have asked of you, and what it would have given you back.
You belong in the only decade that genuinely believed a song could change something, and then kept finding evidence for it. The Sixties is where pop music stopped being entertainment and started being an argument.
You belong in the decade with no interest whatsoever in restraint. The Seventies gave you glam, disco, punk and stadium rock at the same time, and the only thing they agreed on was that more was better.
You belong in the decade where how it looked became as important as how it sounded, and the people who understood that immediately became enormous. MTV rewrote the job description overnight and you would have read the memo first.
You belong in the decade that reacted against everything the previous one stood for. The Nineties decided that polish was suspicious and that the only thing worth being was real, whatever that turned out to cost.
Brown played Marnie in Halloweentown, Halloweentown 2: Kalabar’s Revenge, and Halloweentown High. Sara Paxton then took over the role in Return to Halloweentown, making the fourth movie the only installment without its original lead. Neither actress has been announced for the fifth movie, so Brown’s return is still something fans can hope for, rather than something Disney has officially announced. There might be no announcement regarding who will bring Marnie to the screen again, but Brown has already made her position pretty clear. Speaking in an interview earlier this month, Brown said, “I have told Disney I’m down.” Her willingness to return does not confirm her involvement, but it does mean a reunion would have an enthusiastic original Marnie on the other end of the phone.
All four Halloweentown movies are streaming on Disney+.
