Haunted Mansion coming to Disney Plus in October, the month it probably should’ve been in theaters

What a strange coincidence that the family-friendly ghost movie that opened in theaters in July is now coming to streaming at the perfect time

By Sam Barsanti | September 10, 2023 | 6:45pm

Aux News Haunted Mansion

Haunted Mansion coming to Disney Plus in October, the month it probably should’ve been in theaters

Haunted Mansion Photo: Disney

Disney’s latest Haunted Mansion movie opened in the U.S. on July 28, a week after Barbie and Oppenheimer and several months before it’s generally acceptable to start talking about ghosts and ghouls and stuff—which is to say that it opened way too early in the year and that it probably would’ve been better off avoiding “Barbenheimer” and coming out closer to Halloween. The movie has made a little over $100 million worldwide, which isn’t nothing, but its run in the U.S. box office has been fairly slow and it immediately got buried by bigger movies (again, it opened right after Barbie and Oppenheimer).

Well, in what is either an acknowledgement of that mistake or an indication of just how little Disney values the theatrical experience versus streaming (or both), the studio has announced that Haunted Mansion is coming to Disney+… in October. As revealed today in a press release, the film will be available on Disney+ on October 4, the same day it’s available on VOD services. The timing of that release seems to imply that this was always The Plan, because now there will be a hot new Halloween movie on Disney+ for the scarytimes and it already got a tossed-off theatrical release so nobody can get mad about that.