Credit: Inside the MagicJustin Simien admits that he may have gone down the deep end to ensure that Winona Ryder joins his cast for Haunted Mansion (2023) in a role some fans might not have expected.
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The Stranger Things star is no stranger to creepy creatures lurking in the dark. After playing Will’s mom in the Netflix hit series, Ryder is obviously a veteran of the genre. Her path wasn’t supposed to interlink with Disney’s recent live-action adaptation of their iconic attraction, but she managed to get a role while trying to film her new movie.
Ryder was filming Beetlejuice 2, a sequel that fans recently learned about that will include Jenna Ortega, Michael Keaton, and more. Most sequels recently haven’t lived up to the hype, so some people are still unsure whether to be excited about this sequel happening 35 years later. Some things deserve to have no sequel, but Keaton believes that the sequel is a story worth telling which is why he’s excited for fans to see the film.
For Haunted Mansion, Simien shared with The Hollywood Reporter about how Winona Ryder was taken from the Beetlejuice 2 set without knowing she was ending up on the Haunted Mansion set, and the director was able to convince her to take on a role for the movie:
We kidnapped her. We told her that she was shooting Beetlejuice 2, and she just went with it for a while until she caught on. No, she was one someone that we wanted from the outset. Carmen Cuba, the casting director, myself and the studio were really enamored with this idea of plugging in classic faces in these cameo roles, and it just felt so right that she’d be the tour guide at the end of the movie. She was just so delightfully weird and funny in her performance, and it was a super magical time having her on this project.
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It’s clear that Simien could’ve just asked the actress if she would be interested, but his tactics make it clear that he wanted the movie to be successful at all costs, and having more familiar faces is one way to ensure fans to watch the movie. Unfortunately, Haunted Mansion isn’t making a lot of money for Disney. With less than $30 million in its first weekend at the box office, Haunted Mansion has a slow start and will probably become another project that will make the company lose millions of dollars.
Fans shouldn’t act surprised since the movie’s release was competing with Greta Gerwig’s Barbie (2023), Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer (2023), and Tom Cruise’s Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One (2023), which have broken records at the box office. Barbie has already crossed a billion and proves that good, original stories are what fans want, and making movies based on iconic attractions might not be the best play any longer for Disney.
Do you like Winona Ryder’s role in Haunted Mansion?