Having decided that canceling original content that was deemed to have under-performed wasn’t enough, or even making the call to exile exclusive film and television projects from the library entirely so that they can’t be viewed anywhere by anybody, Disney Plus went ahead and evolved its ruthless strategy to boot two major episodic reboots from the release schedule that had already finished shooting.
As part of a streamlined strategy for costly streaming productions, the Mouse House opted to abandon The Spiderwick Chronicles and Captain Nemo origin story Nautilus despite both of them having wrapped principal photography, leaving them stuck firmly in purgatory and facing an uphill battle to convince a rival platform or network to welcome them in from the cold.
And yet, Goosebumps survived the highly specific cull that saw Disney getting rid of rebooted TV shows derived from mildly successful feature films that it didn’t own the rights to, even though Sony technically steers the live-action direction of the R.L. Stine novels on which the project is based.
Maybe there’s a reason why it was the only one of the three to receive a stay of execution, but a single image isn’t going to be able to answer any of the lingering questions folks may have as to why Goosebumps was deemed more valuable to Disney than either The Spiderwick Chronicles or Nautilus.
There’s no release window as of yet, but with cameras having ceased rolling back in March of this year, it would make a lot of sense for it to land somewhere in the run-up to Halloween given the obvious potential for a spooky do-over with inbuilt name recognition.