A reboot of Disney’s adaptation of their most famously gently-spooky ride has been in development for over a decade now. Guillermo del Toro famously really, really wanted to do it, but instead was forced to make a different haunted mansion movie. But it seems a Haunted Mansion reboot may finally be coming together—now seemingly as something closer to 2003’s broadly comic vision of a ghost-ridden house.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Tiffany Haddish and LaKeith Stanfield are in talks to star in the project, with Dear White People’s Justin Simien set to direct. Katie Dippold (Ghostbusters, The Heat, Spy) has written a script that would see Stanfield as a widower who, very specifically, “once believed in the supernatural but is now a rather lifeless tour guide in New Orleans’ French Quarter”—and whose family moves into the mansion somehow. Haddish will potentially costar as a psychic who can communicate with the dead.
The news comes alongside the release of this weekend’s Jungle Cruise, because we live in a hell in which Disney can just keep putting a couple stars in movies loosely based on the most generically-named amusement park rides, and we just have to accept that they’ll inevitably be hits. Splash Mountain is going to make $650 million worldwide, so start sucking it up now.
