The live-action Gargoyles reboot for Disney+ is officially not happening. Series co-creator Greg Weisman confirmed the news at Fan Expo Chicago 2026, speaking with ComicsOnline in an interview where he addressed the project’s status directly and without ambiguity: “Well, I know the live-action side of it is, uh, the Atomic Monster had the license to develop a live-action Gargoyles for Disney+, and that’s dead. I have no idea about animation, but there are no current plans for live-action.”
Sources close to the project subsequently confirmed the cancellation to both Variety and Deadline, putting any remaining uncertainty to rest. The project, which had been in early development since October 2023, never made it past that initial phase — no casting announcements, no production start, no confirmed release window. Nearly three years after the reboot was announced, it’s gone without ever becoming anything audiences could see.
What the Gargoyles Reboot Was Supposed to Be
The live-action adaptation was announced in October 2023 with a genuinely interesting creative team attached. Gary Dauberman — whose writing credits include It, Annabelle Comes Home, The Nun, and Salem’s Lot — was set to serve as writer, showrunner, and executive producer. James Wan, the director behind the Saw, Insidious, and Conjuring franchises, was attached as executive producer through his production company Atomic Monster, with producer Michael Clear also on board.
On paper, that’s a team with real horror pedigree — and it made sense given what Gargoyles is. The original animated series was unusually dark for Disney, with serialised storytelling, operatic villains, genuine stakes, and themes of betrayal, identity, and redemption that went well beyond what most cartoons of the era were attempting. A horror-adjacent creative team taking that material into live-action had legitimate potential.
Dauberman himself spoke enthusiastically about the project as recently as 2025, telling Collider that the original cartoon “lends itself to a really cool live-action version” and that his take would be “still keeping that darkness to it.” He described his vision as dark, serialised, and mature — faithful to the animated original’s sword-and-sorcery, sci-fi-tinged spirit rather than a sanitised reimagining. Weisman, notably, was not directly involved in the live-action development despite being the show’s creator, which may partly explain why he appears to have learned of its death through the same channels as everyone else.
Why the Original Gargoyles Was Worth Rebooting
For anyone who didn’t grow up with the show, the cultural attachment to Gargoyles runs deep for a specific reason: it was genuinely unlike anything else Disney was making in the 1990s.
The original series ran from 1994 to 1997 across three seasons, produced by Walt Disney Television Animation. The premise: a clan of gargoyles living in Castle Wyvern in medieval Scotland are betrayed and cursed by a spell that traps them in stone form for a thousand years. The curse breaks in modern-day New York, thanks to the machinations of the wealthy industrialist David Xanatos — one of the most celebrated animated villains of the decade, precisely because he wasn’t evil so much as he was utterly amoral and always five steps ahead. The gargoyles, now in 1990s Manhattan, claim the city as their new home and protect it as its secret defenders.
The voice cast was exceptional: Keith David as Goliath, the clan’s noble and conflicted leader; Marina Sirtis and Jonathan Frakes (both from Star Trek: The Next Generation) as recurring characters; Ed Asner, Jeff Bennett, Bill Fagerbakke and more filling out the ensemble. Keith David also voiced Goliath’s ruthless clone Thailog — a casting decision that let him play the hero and the villain of the same story.
The show’s serialised storytelling was ahead of its time for Saturday morning animation. Plot threads carried across entire seasons. Characters had arcs. Villains weren’t defeated and forgotten — they evolved. An IGN retrospective from 2021 noted that the show “helped to redefine cartoon villainy in the ’90s,” and that legacy has kept a passionate fanbase alive for decades since the show ended.
Is There Any Hope for the Franchise?
Weisman’s comments leave one door slightly ajar: he says he has “no idea about animation” and that there are “no current plans for live-action” — which is not quite the same as saying animation is definitively dead too. In July 2026, Brent Spiner — who voiced the trickster character Puck in the original series — hinted during an appearance on the podcast Dropping Names with Brent and Jonny that a revival of the animated series might be in development at Disney Television Animation. He suggested something could be in the works, though Disney has made no formal announcement.
Weisman’s caveat that he has “no idea” about animation suggests one of two things: either Spiner misspoke or overstated what he knew, or an animated revival is genuinely in early discussion but the original creator hasn’t been brought in — which would be its own concerning signal. Either way, there’s nothing concrete to hold onto. The animated original remains fully streamable on Disney+ across all three seasons, which is the only confirmed Gargoyles content fans have access to right now.
Disney+’s Track Record With ’90s Cartoon Reboots
The Gargoyles cancellation lands as part of a broader pattern of Disney+ reboots and revivals that have struggled to make it from announcement to screen. The streaming landscape in 2026 is considerably more cautious than it was during the early Disney+ expansion years, when the platform was greenlighting legacy IP projects with relative freedom. Tighter content budgets and a sharper focus on projects that can drive meaningful subscriber growth have made it harder for niche nostalgia plays — however beloved their source material — to survive the development process.
Gargoyles has an intensely devoted fanbase, but it’s a cult audience rather than a mass-market one. The original show never became a mainstream franchise the way DuckTales or Rescue Rangers did — it was critically admired and deeply loved by its specific audience, without the broad commercial footprint that makes IP revival a lower-risk proposition. That combination of passionate but limited fanbase and the current content environment at Disney+ is likely what ultimately kept the project from advancing.
For fans who grew up watching the Manhattan clan defend the city from the shadows, the news is a genuine disappointment — made slightly more frustrating by how promising the attached creative team was. Gary Dauberman writing a dark, serialised Gargoyles adaptation with James Wan producing was exactly the kind of creative match that made the announcement worth being excited about. The fact that it never got further than that is the part that stings.
All three seasons of the original Gargoyles animated series are available on Disney+ right now if you want to revisit or discover what the fuss is about. It holds up better than most ’90s cartoons, which is either comforting or makes the cancelled reboot more frustrating depending on your perspective.
In other entertainment and gaming news this week, the reaction to Hideo Kojima’s conspicuously brief review of Ridley Scott’s The Dog Stars has taken on a life of its own — fans reading between the lines of what he didn’t say about the divisive post-apocalyptic film. And on the consumer side, PlayStation may owe you money through a $7.85 million class-action settlement if you bought certain digital games between 2019 and 2023 — worth checking your purchase history against the official eligible games list.
