20 Years Later, 'Halloweentown 5' Is Officially Happening at Disney

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 are an idealist who would rather be involved in something unfinished than
  comfortable in something settled.
• Motown, the British Invasion and the whole folk revival happened inside about ten years,
  which is a rate of change nobody has matched since.
• Sam Mendes is releasing four Beatles films in April 2028, one for each member, which is
  the biggest bet anybody has ever placed on this decade.
• The catch is that the decade promised more than it delivered, and the people who lived
  it have been arguing about that ever since.

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 want the night to be worth talking about, and you have never once left a good time
  early.
• This is the decade of the great transformation act, where Bowie changed persona every
  eighteen months and everybody else tried to keep up.
• Disco and punk arrived within a year of each other as two completely opposite answers to
  the same boredom.
• You would have loved it and it would have cost you something, which is roughly the deal
  this decade offered everybody.

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 are ambitious and you see no reason to be shy about it, which this decade regarded
  as an excellent quality.
• A three minute video could break an artist globally, and the ones who treated it as a
  film rather than an advert are the ones still remembered.
• The synthesiser turned the bedroom into a studio and let people with ideas beat people
  with training.
• The risk is that a decade built on image is unkind to anybody who stops keeping up with
  it.

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.

• You can smell a sales pitch from a long way off, and you have never trusted anything
  that tries too hard to be liked.
• Grunge and hip-hop had almost nothing in common musically and exactly the same instinct,
  which was to say the true thing plainly.
• This is the last decade before the internet flattened everything, so a scene could still
  belong to one city.
• The cost was that a decade obsessed with authenticity put unbearable pressure on the
  people who best embodied it.

Will Kimberly J. Brown Return for ‘Halloweentown 5’?

    &lt;<img src="https://static0.colliderimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/ffdd-Cropped.png?q=70&fit=crop&w=825&dpr=1" />
    Image via The Walt Disney Company</figure>