A few years ago, nobody at Disney would have predicted that a live-action remake originally built for streaming would end up carrying the studio’s entire 2025 slate. But that’s what Lilo & Stitch did, opening to a record Memorial Day weekend and becoming Hollywood’s first billion-dollar movie of that year while bigger projects stumbled around it.
Disney greenlit a sequel barely a month later, announcing it on June 26, or 626 Day in Stitch terms. Since then, all we’ve really known about Lilo & Stitch 2 is that it has a release date and a director. At D23 in Anaheim on Aug. 14, 2026, Disney finally showed footage, starting with an image of a pair of glowing pink antennae. Those antennae belong to Angel, also known as Experiment 624, whose live-action debut in Lilo & Stitch 2 was confirmed during the Disney Entertainment Showcase. Maia Kealoha, returning as Lilo, came out to introduce the sneak peek while a fuzzy Stitch waved at the crowd from the screen, and she summed up the reveal about as well as anyone could, asking, “Wait, there’s two of them?!” For longtime fans, Angel needs no introduction.
Angel debuted in Lilo & Stitch: The Series as a pink counterpart to Stitch, with a siren song capable of flipping reformed experiments back to their destructive programming, and she went on to become his love interest and one of the franchise’s most merchandised characters. For everyone else, her presence is the first concrete clue about what kind of movie this sequel aims to be. Disney has said the film tells a brand-new story rather than adapting Stitch! The Movie or its direct-to-video follow-ups, but pulling Angel into the mix confirms it’s willing to raid the wider experimental mythology that the TV series built out in the early 2000s.
The first remake actually seeded this, tucking Easter eggs referencing Angel and other experiments into the background, which producer Jonathan Eirich pointed out before anyone knew a sequel was coming. The other notable shift is behind the camera. Chris Sanders, who co-created and co-directed the original animated film, wrote this sequel’s screenplay, and has voiced Stitch in every incarnation, including the remake, is directing this time. That makes Lilo & Stitch 2 Sanders’ first time steering the franchise he launched in 2002, which is a genuinely rare kind of homecoming in the remake era.
Dean Fleischer Camp, who directed the first film, had been openly measured about coming back when Variety asked him during the original’s press run, saying, “If it was the right idea. I wouldn’t do it just because there’s a new market demand for it. But I also really like the idea of doing an animated spin-off as an episodic or limited series.” Camp also made clear how central Sanders was to his own involvement in the first place.
“That was one of the first conversations. I made sure to get that assurance before I even said yes to the project. I was like, ‘Chris Sanders.’ And they said, ‘Yeah, he’s eager to come back,’ so working with him was a dream.”
Production is set to begin in Hawai’i later this year, with Eirich back as producer, ahead of a May 26, 2028 release that sees Disney once again claiming Memorial Day weekend. The studio hasn’t confirmed which other cast members return beyond Kealoha, so there’s still plenty of news left to come.
