Disney+ won a five-way bidding war to develop a live-action series based on Casper the Friendly Ghost, the streamer announced Wednesday — pairing one of pop culture’s most recognizable supernatural characters with the team behind its own Goosebumps franchise and a returning Steven Spielberg.
Rob Letterman, who will direct, write, and executive produce, and Hilary Winston, who writes and executive produces, previously ran Disney+’s Goosebumps series together. Spielberg, whose Amblin Entertainment produced the 1995 Casper feature film starring Christina Ricci, returns in an executive producing capacity. The project is a co-production between DreamWorks Animation TV and UCP, a division of Universal Studio Group.
The series is described as a “modern update on the classic ghost story” with a dark edge, drawing comparisons to the way Netflix’s Wednesday reimagined the Addams Family universe. Specific plot details have not been disclosed, and the show remains in early development.
The new series will combine live-action and CGI, continuing the production approach used in the 1995 film, which pioneered computer-generated effects to bring Casper to life on screen. That film featured Ricci and Bill Pullman, with Malachi Pearson voicing the ghost and a then-unknown Devon Sawa briefly appearing as Casper in human form.
The character originated in animated short films produced by Famous Studios between 1945 and 1959. Harvey Comics, which had published Casper comics since 1952, acquired the character outright in 1959. DreamWorks Animation purchased Classic Media — which held the Harvey library — in 2012, and NBCUniversal absorbed DreamWorks four years later, which explains the co-production structure between DreamWorks Animation TV and UCP on a Disney+ title.
This marks a rare instance of Disney+ developing a series built around IP that sits entirely outside the Disney ecosystem — if the show goes to series, Casper would share the platform with famous Disney ghost characters including Zero from The Nightmare Before Christmas.
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A previous attempt at a live-action Casper series was announced at Peacock in 2022, framed as a coming-of-age story from writer Kai Yu Wu. That project did not move forward, and it remains unclear how the two efforts relate to each other. Fans have already raised the question of whether Ricci could reprise a connection to the material, as she did with Wednesday on Netflix — a callback to her childhood role as Wednesday Addams.
