Disney Dates Live-Action Tangled for March 2028, Reveals First Footage at D23
Disney has set a release date for its live-action Tangled: the film arrives in theatres on 31 March 2028. The announcement came during Disney's D23 fan event at the Honda Center in Anaheim, California, where the studio also screened the first footage from the film (Deadline).
Teagan Croft, an Australian actress, plays Rapunzel — the long-haired princess locked in a tower who yearns to see the floating lanterns. Milo Manheim, known to Disney Channel audiences from the Zombies musical franchise, stars as Flynn Rider, the charming thief who becomes her guide. Kathryn Hahn plays Mother Gothel, the woman who keeps Rapunzel hidden away for her own ends (Deadline; The Hollywood Reporter).
Behind the camera, Michael Gracey directs. Gracey's name carries weight with musical-minded audiences: he previously directed The Greatest Showman, the Hugh Jackman spectacle that became a slow-burn box-office phenomenon.
The source material gives the studio a solid foundation. The 2010 animated Tangled grossed $607.6 million at the global box office, including $200.8 million in North America — domestic, in trade terms, meaning the United States and Canada combined (Deadline). Those numbers place it among Disney's mid-tier animated hits of the past two decades: a healthy performer, if not in the billion-dollar stratosphere of Frozen or The Lion King.
The live-action adaptation follows a well-worn Disney playbook. The studio has spent the past decade reworking its animated catalogue into live-action features, with titles like Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and The Little Mermaid each crossing half a billion dollars globally. Tangled slots into that pipeline with a spring 2028 corridor — a window where Disney has historically launched family-friendly tentpoles ahead of the Easter holiday period.
For fans, the D23 footage offers the first real look at how the film translates the animated original's distinctive palette and lantern-lit skyline into live action. The casting of Croft, a relative newcomer to blockbuster-scale productions, pairs an emerging lead against Hahn's established comic timing — a dynamic that echoes the original film's tone, where menace and humour sat side by side.
The 31 March 2028 date puts Tangled into a spring slot with ample runway before the summer blockbuster season begins in earnest. Disney now has roughly 20 months to build awareness before audiences decide whether this particular tower is worth the climb.
