Disney's D23 showcase put dates on films running to 2029, and the slate reads fine one title at a time. Read as a column, it says something less comfortable: the company has effectively appointed a single studio to carry every original idea it intends to release this decade.
Count the originals
Go through the dated theatrical films. Gatto on 5 March 2027. Ghost Market in March 2028. Disney's Hexed on 25 November 2026. Clay in 2028. That is the list.
Everything else with a date on it is a sequel, a remake or a franchise entry: Frozen 3, Incredibles 3, Coco 2, Zootopia 3, Lilo & Stitch 2, Tangled, Ice Age: Boiling Point, The Simpsons Movie, The Bluey Movie, an untitled X-Men film, Avengers: Doomsday and Star Wars: Starfighter.
Three of the four belong to one studio
Pixar owns Gatto and Ghost Market, and Walt Disney Animation has Hexed and Clay. Weight that by how much of each studio's dated output is new, and the imbalance sharpens: Pixar has four dated films and three are originals. Disney Animation's originals sit beside Frozen 3 and a Zootopia threequel.
Live action, across the entire company, has produced no dated original at all. Every one of its slots is a revival.
Being the designated risk-taker is not a compliment
It is tempting to read this as Disney trusting Pixar, and there is some of that. But a studio that is the sole source of original films inside a company this size does not get to fail quietly. When four sequels underperform, the conversation is about marketing and release dates. When the one original underperforms, the conversation is about whether original films work.
That asymmetry changes what gets pitched. A director inside a studio carrying that expectation is under pressure to make the safest possible version of an unfamiliar idea — which is how you end up with originals that feel focus-grouped into shapes audiences already recognise, and then get cited as proof that audiences only want sequels.
Television repeats the shape. The Disney+ slate leans on Percy Jackson's third season, a second run of Ahsoka, Camp Rock 3 and a Kingdom Hearts anime — properties with audiences already attached, or adapted from properties that already have them.
None of that is unusual for a streaming service, where the cost of acquiring a viewer for something unfamiliar is the hardest number in the business. But it means the pattern is not a quirk of the film slate. It is how the company currently allocates risk across every division that makes something.
The sequels are not the problem
None of this is an argument that Incredibles 3 should not exist. Sequels fund the building. Disney's own numbers show what dependable properties are worth, and a company with theme parks, cruise ships and a streaming service to feed has structural reasons to want films whose audience is known in advance.
The problem is distribution of risk, not volume of sequels. Twelve franchise films and four originals is a ratio a company can survive. Four originals sourced from two animation studios, with live action contributing nothing new, is a single point of failure dressed up as a portfolio.
Where an original could actually come from
The live-action column is where the gap is most obvious and most fixable. Tangled and Lilo & Stitch 2 occupy 2028 slots that could as easily have held something new, and the budgets involved are not meaningfully different.
There is even a working template inside the company. Lucasfilm has put an original character and an unseen era on the 50th-anniversary weekend with Starfighter — a franchise film, but one taking real narrative risk inside a known brand. That is a middle path Disney's live-action division has not attempted.
The number worth revisiting
Slates move. Titles announced for 2028 and 2029 will shift, and some will quietly vanish. The useful thing is to note the ratio now and check it again when the 2028 films firm up.
If the originals are the ones that slip while the sequels hold their dates, that will not be a scheduling accident. It will be the answer to what a company does when only one part of it is allowed to try something.
