With Disney's Jungle Cruise scheduled to set sail in theaters this Friday, it feels like the perfect time to announce new details about the studio's Haunted Mansion movie. It's been reported that LaKeith Stanfield (Sorry to Bother You, Get Out) and Tiffany Haddish (Girls Trip, Like a Boss)are in talks to star in the new film with Justin Simien (Dear White People, Bad Hair) directing. This will be Simien's biggest budgeted film to date, which has Katie Dippold writing the script.
Haunted Mansion will follow a family that moves into the titular mansion. According to THR, Stanfield will play a widower who once believed in the supernatural but is now a rather lifeless tour guide in New Orleans’s French Quarter. Haddish would play a psychic hired to commune with the dead.
Scheduled to enter production in Louisiana this fall, Dan Lin and Jonathan Eirich of Rideback will produce. Additionally, Rideback’s Nick Reynolds is exec producing.
Coincidentally, I just finished watching an episode of Behind the Attraction on Disney+ that focuses on the fabled Disney attraction. Disney's Haunted Mansion opened in 1969 after years of toiling and compromise for the frightful yet funny theme park experience. The premise for the ride involves guests of the park going inside a spooky manor where they encounter ghosts, ghouls, and other members of the undead community. As you venture through the manor, the building itself warps and changes its appearance on several occasions. The experience eventually ends with an unforgettable ghostly encounter that will have you think ghosts are following you back to your hotel.
Disney adapted the attraction into a 2003 movie directed by Rob Minkoff. It starred Eddie Murphy, Marsha Thompson, Jennifer Tilly, Wallace Shawn, and Terrance Stamp, among others, and followed a similar plot of a family visiting the spooky mansion. It scared up a couple of bucks at the box office but hardly moved the needle by Disney standards. Perhaps another tour around the classic attraction will summon a franchise launch for the House of Mouse.
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