When Disney closed its D23 Entertainment Showcase in Anaheim on Aug. 14, the live-action Tangled came away with a release date, March 31, 2028, and a first look that played to the Honda Center crowd rather than to YouTube. The footage itself was brief, covering two characters, but the announcement wrapped around it was considerably larger.
Most of the top line was already known. Teagan Croft plays Rapunzel, and Milo Manheim plays Flynn Rider, Kathryn Hahn is Mother Gothel, and Michael Gracey (The Greatest Showman, Better Man) is directing from a script by Jennifer Kaytin Robinson and Michael Montemayor, with Kristin Burr producing. What Disney added on Friday was the rest of Corona: both of Rapunzel’s parents, the Stabbington twins, and, at last, a name for the character invented specifically for the remake.
Deadline reports that Caitriona Balfe will play Queen Arianna, with Elliot Cowan (The Crown) alongside her as King Frederic. Balfe wasn’t in the footage screened on Friday, so the Outlander lead arrived by press release rather than by teaser.
Anyone following the Alicante shoot won’t be surprised. A set video from the end of July showed Balfe in costume filming the reunion scene — the moment Rapunzel is finally returned to her parents — and the footage circulated widely enough that her casting was treated as a done deal well before Disney said anything. It’s a slightly awkward sequence of events for a studio that guarded its D23 reel so carefully that it refused to release it online.
Arianna is a small part with a disproportionate amount of work on her shoulders. She has very little dialogue in the 2010 film, yet still has to carry the emotional weight of a kingdom that has spent 18 years launching lanterns for a missing child. Casting a five-time Golden Globe nominee suggests Gracey wants that reunion to really land, which is a good instinct given that the original grossed roughly $592 million worldwide against an estimated $260 million budget, making it the most expensive animated film ever made at the time. There’s a fair bit riding on this one.
Balfe is having a busy August. Outlander finished its eight-season run on Starz earlier this year, and Apple TV ordered Ascension, Alfonso Cuarón’s long-gestating cult horror series, with Balfe starring and executive producing, less than a week before the Tangled news broke. She also has the Apple film Tenzing ahead of her.
The remake itself has had a bumpier road. Disney shelved Tangled after Snow White collapsed in 2025 and revived it when Lilo & Stitch cleared $1 billion, but live-action Moana then opened to $43 million domestically in July, the studio’s weakest remake debut in a decade, against a reported $250 million budget. Two of the last three have lost money, and Gracey is inheriting that record with a cast now filled out down to the Stabbington twins and one genuine unknown: Diego Luna as someone called Hawthorne, and Disney hasn’t said a word about who that is.
- Release Date
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November 24, 2010
- Runtime
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100 minutes
