Disenchanted’s first trailer looks like all of Disney’s evil witch stories rolled into one

Director Adam Shankman’s Enchanted sequel looks like a distillation of a bunch of Disney’s recent stories about witches messing with reality

While Enchanted was a surprisingly inspired riff on the studio’s archetypical princess fairytales, Disenchanted, director Adam Shankman’s upcoming sequel to the movie, looks like a straightforward redux of Disney’s recent stories about witches fiddling with reality in its first trailer.

Disenchanted continues the tale of Giselle Philip (Amy Adams), the former princess-to-be of the animated kingdom of Andalasia who left her magical, sing-song life behind in Enchanted in order to marry divorce attorney Robert Philip (Patrick Dempsey) in the “real” world. Though Giselle was all too happy to join Robert in his world, and she doesn’t entirely regret leaving her life as a princess behind, Disenchanted spotlights how there are some things about her old home that she longs for.

As tends to be the case with Giselle, she puts on a good face as she, Robert, their newborn baby, and his teenage daughter from a previous marriage, Morgan (Gabriella Baldacchino), all move to the city of Monroeville for the next chapter of their story. But as tends to be the case with people who move to small, quiet towns not really knowing what they are, it isn’t long before Giselle finds herself wishing for things to be different, an act that has a different significance to it for storybook princesses like her.

Disenchanted’s trailer features some of the tongue-in-cheek meta-humor that defined Enchanted. What’s even more pronounced throughout, though, is how much in common the movie seemingly has with Marvel’s WandaVisionand Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness — both stories about women who end up becoming evil witches while trying to make their dreams come true. Disenchanted could definitely have something a bit new or inspired to say about those kinds of narratives when it hits Disney Plus on November 18th, but it could just as easily end up feeling a bit like a more musical, fanciful What If...? scenario.