Casper the Friendly Ghost will get the live-action series treatment at Disney+.
Disney+ has landed the rights to a TV take on beloved character Casper the Friendly Ghost in a competitive bidding war, TheWrap has learned. The project hails from Rob Letterman and Hilary Winston, who executive produce Disney+’s “Goosebumps” series, as well as Steven Spielberg, who served as an EP on the 1995 “Casper” movie starring Christina Ricci.
Letterman is attached to direct, executive produce and write the series while Winston serves as a writer and EP and Spielberg serves solely in an executive producing role.
The series is produced by UCP, a division of Universal Studio Group, as well as DreamWorks Animation TV.
The new series is described as a “modern update on the classic ghost story,” though no further details have been revealed.
It’s also unknown if Ricci could appear in the new series, similar to her role in Netflix’s “Wednesday,” which gives a through-line after she starred in “The Addams Family” in 1991 as Wednesday Addams.
Ricci starred in “Casper” alongside Bill Pullman, Cathy Moriarty, Chauncey Leopardi, Spencer Vrooman, Ben Stein and Eric Idle, among others.
In 2022, a live-action series about Casper was announced to be in the works at Peacock from Dreamworks and UCP, though that project took a different angle by embracing a “coming-of-age story that explores what it means to be alive,” per the logline. “When a new family arrives in the small town of Eternal Falls, Casper finds himself entangled in a mystery uncovering dark secrets that have been buried for over 100 years,” the logline concludes.
That project hailed from writer and executive producer Kai Yu Wu (“The Flash,” “Hannibal”). It’s unclear if the new series evolved from that project.
