Trivia / Haunted Mansion (2023)

• Billing Displacement: Winona Ryder, Daniel Levy, and Hasan Minhaj are listed in the opening credits along with the main actors, but all three only have small cameos.
• Box Office Bomb: Budget, somewhere around $157 million. Box office, $115.6 million. After over a decade of fading in and out of Development Hell, the film was released in July 2023 to mediocre reviews amidst tepid interest, especially with a questionable release date in the middle of the summer rather than the fall, with a below-estimate $24 million debut weekend (a worse opening weekend than that of the previous Haunted Mansion unadjusted for inflation) that continued to nosedive in subsequent weeks, in large part due to competition from box office juggernauts Barbie (2023) and Oppenheimer.
• Distanced from Current Events: Due to the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike, Disney had popular characters from their theme parks as well as other movies show up on the red carpet for the premiere, due to the cast not being allowed to attend the premiere per their guidelines of not promoting struck work during the strike.
• Milestone Celebration: The movie was released on the 20th anniversary year of the first film adaptation.
• Saved from Development Hell: The idea of a new The Haunted Mansion film lingered for well over a decade. Originally it was helmed by Guillermo del Toro, who is a diehard fan of the ride and sought to take the property back to its horror roots. Unfortunately, despite turning in multiple script drafts to Disney for approval and announcements of Ryan Gosling being attached to star, Disney kept pushing it back and the project was kicked around to other creators. Eventually, the movie in its final form was announced in 2020.
• Screwed by the Network: The film was released in the middle of summer 2023, pointed out by many box office analysts as something that led to it being doomed from the start. While Disney's logic was ostensibly based on taking advantage of kids being off from school during summer vacation, the dual releases of Barbie (2023) and Oppenheimer in nearly the same weekends were already expected to be the big Hollywood event of summer, and Haunted Mansion seemed far more appropriate for the Halloween season. Even if Disney was worried about the stacked Q3 2023 schedule (including The Nun II, A Haunting in Venice, Saw X, The Exorcist: Believer, and Five Nights at Freddy's (2023)), none of those properties were particularly family-friendly, making the summer release even more confusing.^note Not the first Disney film to end up with an out-of-season theatrical release; both had the same rationale of aiming for a Halloween home media release, though Hocus Pocus came out in a far more lucrative era of home media than the 2020s. The film ultimately landed on Disney+ in October, appropriate for Halloween, which drew criticism towards Disney for seemingly treating the streaming debut as more important than the theatrical release date.
• What Could Have Been: Eddie Murphy, who starred in the previous film version, was invited back to make a cameo appearance, but was turned down when he demanded $500,000 for one day of work.

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