Every Anniversary Disney Celebrated at D23 2026, Decoded
D23 2026 spent much of its weekend looking backward. Here are the eight anniversaries Disney celebrated, and why the birthday panels are also a business plan.
Todd Ruffner-Schoenfeld
Editor in chief. A knack for the fine print, and likes it.
Alongside the new-project reveals, D23 2026 spent much of its weekend looking backward, with a run of anniversary panels spread across the Anaheim Convention Center and the Walt Disney Archives Stage from August 14 to 16. Eight milestones in all got their own celebration. Here they are, oldest film to newest, and what the lineup of birthdays is really doing.
The milestones Disney marked
Alice in Wonderland, 75 years. The 1951 classic, with Kathryn Beaumont as Alice, honored as one of Disney animation’s most enduringly strange and beloved films.
101 Dalmatians, 65 years. The 1961 feature that changed how Disney animation looked, celebrated with rarely seen art from the Animation Research Library.
Marvel’s Spider-Man, 65 years. Six and a half decades since Peter Parker first appeared, marked by Disney and Marvel as a headline anniversary.
Bedknobs and Broomsticks, 55 years. The 1971 live-action and animation hybrid, revisited in a multimedia panel by Disney historian Jim Fanning.
Beauty and the Beast, 35 years. The 1991 landmark, celebrated with a panel that streamed globally on Disney+ to open the weekend.
Kingdom Hearts, 25 years. The Disney and Square Enix crossover game, given a Deep Dive panel that treated the anniversary as a headline moment rather than a footnote.
Enchanted, 20 years. The 2007 film that turned fairy-tale tropes into a live-action love letter, honored on the Archives Stage.
Zootopia, 10 years. The 2016 Oscar winner, celebrated on the same weekend Disney confirmed Zootopia 3 is in development.
Decoded: nostalgia is a business plan
A birthday panel looks like fan service, and it is, but line these eight up and a strategy shows through. The anniversaries Disney chooses to celebrate are rarely random. Zootopia’s tenth was marked on the very weekend a third film was announced. Enchanted’s twentieth arrives as Disney mines its own catalog for live-action and sequel material. Each celebration is also a reminder, delivered to the most devoted audience in the room, that a piece of intellectual property is alive, loved, and available to be sold again. That is not a knock on the films, which have earned their affection. It is simply worth seeing the machine for what it is: at a modern D23, an anniversary is both a genuine tribute and a soft launch, and the two are increasingly hard to tell apart.
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