51 Years Ago Today, Disney’s Forgotten Fantasy Film Started a New Franchise (And We Need a New Reboot)

Although Disney has a lot of franchises that are more famous, one of their most intriguing and bizarre blends of fantasy and sci-fi debuted 51 years ago and deserves to be rebooted in the near future. Some of Disney’s biggest sci-fi movies have become disastrous, expensive flops despite seeming to have all the ingredients of a box office success. From A Wrinkle in Time to John Carter to Artemis Fowl, the company sometimes seems to have the worst luck when it comes to the sci-fi genre, despite the success of the MCU and Star Wars.

However, one underrated Disney franchise, the Witch Mountain movies, managed to buck this trend. Beginning on March 21, 1975, with the release of director John Hough’s Escape to Witch Mountain, the series continued with 1978’s Return from Witch Mountain and 1982’s Beyond Witch Mountain. The original movie was remade in 1995 as an ABC Family movie of the same name, before the franchise was later rebooted with 2009’s Dwayne Johnson vehicle Race to Witch Mountain, directed by She’s The Man’s Andy Fickman.

Escape To Witch Mountain Is One of Disney’s Most Ambitiously Weird Franchises

Although all of the Witch Mountain movies feature unique spins on the franchise’s central premise, the bones of all their stories are similar. The Witch Mountain movies follow a pair of alien children as they try to enlist the help of a human to escape Earth by returning to the eponymous Witch Mountain and boarding their crashed spaceship. The kids are pursued by government agents and hitmen hoping to capture them before they can leave the planet, resulting in a propulsive chase story.

Read Next

Disney Actually Messed Up By Cancelling This Live-Action Remake

If this sounds a little heavy and strange for a kid’s movie, that’s likely because it is. The original Witch Mountain movies and 2009’s reboot don’t shy away from the trippy elements of their premise, and were praised upon release for refusing to tone down their genre elements for younger viewers. While hardly Dwayne Johnson’s best movie, 2009’s reboot is a surprisingly unpredictable, more explosive spin on the 1975 original, and even Hough’s original Escape To Witch Mountain is still a fun, well-paced kids’ adventure story with a killer premise.

Disney’s Witch Mountain Franchise Needs A New Reboot After Its Cancelled TV Show

Although there were talks of a Witch Mountain reboot series starring Bryce Dallas Howard, the Jurassic World franchise star told fans in 2024 that these plans had been scrapped. As disappointing as this news was, it should not deter Disney from taking another stab at the underrated series. From the psychic powers that the alien teens possess to the shady villains who are trying to hunt down and vivisect them, the franchise isn’t short of intriguing, under-explored lore that could easily sustain the longer runtime of a TV series.

In an era when Disney is making TV shows out of every franchise from Alien to The Mighty Ducks, the Witch Mountain movies are a rare example of a series that didn’t originally have the screen time or budget necessary to flesh out its promising fictional universe. As such, a new show that reboots the franchise that started with Escape to Witch Mountain would be a superb idea for the entertainment giant in 2026.