One of Disney’s Best Movies in Recent Years Isn’t Getting a Sequel

Feel free to connect with him or check out his work. He’s everywhere — Upwork, YouTube, Spotify, SoundCloud, Collider, LinkedIn, Instagram. 

Disney Animation and Pixar are actively returning to major properties including but not limited to Frozen, Zootopia, The Incredibles, and Coco and in the midst of that one absence has especially become noticeable. During Yvett Merino’s exclusive interview with The Direct, she revealed that the animated 2021 Disney film that became much bigger than its theatrical gross suggests, won’t be continuing anymore but there’s a catch to it.

The film went on to rake in only about $261.3 million worldwide, including roughly $96.1 million domestically. Under normal circumstances, those numbers might explain why Disney wasn’t rushing toward a sequel. But the movie arrived during the pandemic-era theatrical market and then became dramatically bigger after reaching Disney+. And because it came during the pandemic, audiences went on to watch approximately 27.4 billion minutes of the film during 2022, which also made it the year’s most streamed film in the U.S.

The title in crosshairs is Encanto and Merino, who is now also a Walt Disney Animation Studios creative executive, in reply to being asked whether there were plans for greenlighting and developing Encanto 2, replied: “No, but I’m always here for it.” So as of October 22, 2026, according to someone who produced the original film, there have apparently been no discussions about greenlighting an Encanto sequel. At the same time, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the franchise is dead.

Four worlds and four completely different ideas of what a good life
looks like. This is where you belong, what it would ask of you, and what you would get back in
return.

You belong somewhere old enough that the mountains have names and
somebody can still tell you who gave them. Middle-earth is for people who think the right
thing is worth doing even when it will not be finished in their lifetime.

• This is the only world on the list where doing good is understood as a very long defeat,
  fought anyway, by people who will never see how it ends.
• You are drawn to grandeur, to white cities and deep forges and the sense that almost
  everything you touch is older than your entire family line.
• The Rings of Power is set in the last good age before it all goes wrong, which gives
  every quiet scene in it a slightly unbearable weight.
• You would take the hard road, and you would take it on foot.

You want the sea, a crew, and absolutely nobody telling you where
you are allowed to go. The Grand Line is the world for people whose main ambition in life is
finding out what is over there.

• One Piece has run for decades on one very simple engine, which is a group of people who
  each want something impossible and have decided to go and get it together.
• You collect people. Your ideal crew is a set of misfits who were each written off
  somewhere else before you turned up and offered them a better idea.
• The world is enormous and deliberately ridiculous, and the emotional gut punches land
  harder because of that rather than in spite of it.
• You would set sail knowing the map runs out, which is more or less the entire point of
  it.

You would rather be feared and useful than liked and useless. The
Continent is a world where the monsters are the straightforward part of the job and the
people are where it all gets complicated.

• Witchers get paid to do what nobody else will and resented for existing at all, which is
  a trade most people would refuse and you would probably accept.
• You have no real illusions about which side is the good one, largely because on the
  Continent that question tends to have a disappointing answer.
• The best of these stories are not about the fighting. They are about somebody with a
  rigid code being repeatedly cornered into caring about people.
• You would take the coin, finish the job properly, and be out of town before the story
  got told wrong.

You want the myths to be real and loose in the actual world, and
you want to find out at about thirteen that you were never anywhere near as ordinary as
everybody kept telling you.

• Percy Jackson takes the oldest stories we have and drops them into car parks and diners,
  which makes the gods considerably funnier and a great deal worse.
• You would be the kid every school gave up on, who turns out to have been built for
  something nobody thought to test for.
• The series is genuinely about friendship rather than destiny, and it says so out loud
  every time a prophecy tries to get in the way.
• Camp Half-Blood is the real fantasy here: a place where the thing that made you
  difficult everywhere else is the thing that makes you belong.

Disney Is Investing Heavily in ‘Encanto’ Outside of Movie Theaters

Merino specifically brought a project up while answering the sequel question for Encanto. There’s reportedly a major Encanto attraction being built for the new Tropical Americas land at Disney’s Animal Kingdom in Walt Disney World. Disney says guests will actually enter the Madrigals’ Casita, with the attraction centered on Antonio and his magical gift. Merino bringing that up is telling because it says the franchise is alive, the brand is valuable, and Disney is probably choosing to make a strategic decision and focusing on other stronger bets including but not limited The Incredibles 3 and Frozen 3 arriving on November 24, 2027 for now.

Encanto’s exposure seems to be contained, considering the fact that it didn’t do too well at the box office and its streaming come-up primarily got linked to the lockdowns and pandemic. But given Merino’s response that she’s always here for it, the franchise certainly isn’t dying.

Encanto is available to stream on Disney+. Stay tuned to Collider for more updates.