The Full Guide · 22 Parts Disney

D23 2026, Live: Your Guide to Every Disney Reveal, Panel, and Legend

Three nights, dozens of panels, and the biggest show floor in D23 history. Here is your guide to everything Disney is sharing this weekend, updated live.

Todd Ruffner-Schoenfeld Editor in chief. A knack for the fine print, and likes it. 13 Aug 2026 7 min read 28 sources E.G. v4.16

Abstract painted illustration of two premiere searchlight beams crossing high in a night sky with colorful confetti catching the light. — AI-generated illustration.

D23 2026 is the biggest gathering Disney has ever thrown for the people who love it, three days at the Anaheim Convention Center from August 14 to 16, with three headline nights at the Honda Center next door. Friday is the Disney Entertainment Showcase, an evening of films, series, surprise guests, and live music. Saturday is Horizons: A Carousel of Progress, the Disney Experiences showcase hosted by Neil Patrick Harris, where the parks news lands. Sunday closes the weekend with the Disney Legends Awards Ceremony, hosted by Ryan Seacrest. More than fifty panels run across the three days, most of them streaming on Disney+, and the show floor is the largest in D23 history.

This is our home base for all of it. Pick the corner of the magic you came for and jump straight in. We are covering the whole weekend as it happens, and every section below fills with real news the moment Disney shares it.

Jump to your weekend

Parks and Experiences

Saturday night is parks night. The Horizons: Disney Experiences showcase, hosted by Neil Patrick Harris, brings the news on every new land and ride Disney is building. We are tracking all of it, from a Coco ride at Disney California Adventure to a Villains land at Magic Kingdom to a whole resort rising in Abu Dhabi.

See where each project stands right now in our full parks tracker.

Film

Friday night belongs to the Disney Entertainment Showcase at 7:00 p.m. PT, and this is the room where the movie news breaks. First looks are expected from Walt Disney Animation, Pixar, Marvel Studios, Lucasfilm, and 20th Century, alongside the surprise guests and sizzle reels the showcase is known for. Nothing is official until it is on that stage, so this section stays quiet until it is not, and then it fills fast. We are watching it live.

TV and Streaming

There is plenty here beyond the big screen. Percy Jackson and the Olympians returns for a Season 3 panel on Saturday, and the show floor hands fans real estate to visit, including activations for The Simpsons, Bluey, and Camp Rock 3. If you came to D23 for the small screen, this is your corner, and we will track every series update and first look as it lands.

Games

Kingdom Hearts turns twenty-five this year, and D23 marks it with an in-person anniversary celebration for the series that fused Disney and Final Fantasy into something fans have loved for a generation. Whatever news arrives for the games side of Disney across the weekend, you will find it here.

Music and Concerts

The weekend is stacked with live music. A Whole New World of Alan Menken brings the Disney Legend to the stage for a rare solo concert through his songbook. The Disney Rewind Concert celebrates Disney and Broadway hits of the 1980s and 1990s, with a Saturday encore streaming on Disney+. And The Muppets Musical History with Seth MacFarlane walks through the songs that made the Muppets sing.

Disney Legends

Sunday afternoon at the Honda Center, Ryan Seacrest hosts the Disney Legends Awards Ceremony at 1:30 p.m. PT, and the 2026 class is a love letter to a lot of childhoods. This year Disney honors Chris Berman, Jerry Bruckheimer, Susan Egan, Eric Goldberg, Anne Hathaway, Bob Iger, Kim Irvine, Dwayne Johnson, the Jonas Brothers, Lin-Manuel Miranda, and Alan Tudyk. We will have the moments and the speeches as they happen.

Anniversaries and Celebrations

Some of Disney’s best-loved stories hit big milestones this year, and D23 is throwing them a party. The weekend celebrates seventy-five years of Alice in Wonderland, thirty-five years of Beauty and the Beast, twenty-five years of Kingdom Hearts, and sixty-five years of Marvel’s Spider-Man, with tributes and displays across the event.

Show Floor and Fandom

The show floor is the largest in D23 history, and it is a day out on its own. Walk through the Walt Disney Imagineering pavilion, step onto life-size film sets at Mundo Pixar, get close to Disney history at the Walt Disney Archives “Uncrated” exhibition, and see a Mickey Formula 1 car up close. The D23 Mousequerade costume contest brings out the best cosplay in the fandom, and the Jonas Brothers are taping their podcast on site. This is where being a fan is the whole point.

Live from D23

The moments worth stopping for from across D23 2026, newest first. We add the big ones as Disney confirms them.

[Aug 14, 8:55 p.m. PT] Frozen 3 is dated for November 24, 2027, with a villainess teased to rival Elsa. Full story.

[Aug 14, 8:40 p.m. PT] Avengers: Doomsday got its first look, and tickets are on sale for the December 18, 2026 opening, with Robert Downey Jr. as Doctor Doom. Full story.

[Aug 14, 8:25 p.m. PT] Pixar stacked its slate with Incredibles 3 in June 2028 and Coco 2 in 2029.

[Aug 14, 8:10 p.m. PT] Star Wars: Starfighter teased its Ryan Gosling led adventure for May 28, 2027. Full story.

What we are hoping to see

Everybody who loves Disney walks into a weekend like this with a wish list, and we are no different. None of this is a demand, just the news we would be thrilled to hear.

We are Pixar fans at heart, so the two Orlando projects have our attention: Piston Peak, the Cars-themed land coming to Magic Kingdom, and Monstropolis, the Monsters, Inc. land coming to Disney’s Hollywood Studios. A name, a ride system, or an opening year for either one would make our whole weekend. A date for that first-ever Coco ride at Disney California Adventure would be the cherry on top.

Beyond the parks, we would love a real first look at what Walt Disney Animation and Pixar have coming next, another surprise or two from Marvel and Lucasfilm on Friday night, and a few of those goosebump moments the Legends ceremony always delivers on Sunday.

We will be updating this page the whole way through. If Disney hands us any of it, you will see it here.

When the show floor finally went dark, we ranked the whole weekend: the 10 biggest reveals, the 10 quietest, and the 10 no one saw coming.

Sources

Reported and edited to HeadLines Decoded newsroom standards. E.G. v4.16 · I.R.G. v1.13 · L.R.G. v1.9 · P.L.G. v1.10 · Living Article Guidelines v1.0. This story is updated live while D23 runs; every change is recorded in the update log above.

The Full Series

D23 2026

16 parts

A series by Todd Ruffner-Schoenfeld.

D23, Disney’s big fan event, ran Aug. 14 to 16, 2026, at the Anaheim Convention Center in California. On Friday night the Disney Entertainment Showcase dated films as far out as November 2029. On Saturday night Neil Patrick Harris hosted Horizons: A Carousel of Progress, the parks showcase at the Honda Center in Anaheim, where Disney put years on two big projects it had first announced in 2024. One is Monstropolis, the Monsters, Inc. land at Disney’s Hollywood Studios in Florida. It opens in 2027, in phases. Avengers Infinity Defense and Stark Flight Lab, the two new rides at Avengers Campus in Disney California Adventure, are set for 2028. Ryan Seacrest hosted the Disney Legends ceremony on Sunday.

A family deciding when to book a trip needs an opening year. At D23 in August 2024, Disney announced eleven new lands and rides around the world. Only two got a year. EPCOT’s reimagined Test Track reopened on schedule, on July 22, 2025. Tropical Americas at Disney’s Animal Kingdom was still billed for 2027 on the Disney Parks Blog as late as April 30, 2026. Most of the others still have no opening date, even where steel is already standing, so the series keeps what Disney has said apart from what fan sites work out from permits and construction photos.

Most of the series is about the parks, one project to a part, each written just before the showcase and updated live as Disney added details. At Magic Kingdom, the Villains land going in behind Big Thunder Mountain now has two named rides, a Maleficent coaster and a dark ride hosted by the Magic Mirror. Nearby, Piston Peak National Park, the Cars land being built where the Rivers of America used to run, gets a rally ride called Cars Ridge Run Rally and a gentler family ride. Monstropolis brings the first suspended coaster at any Disney park, the kind where the cars hang below the track, and Tropical Americas pairs an Indiana Jones ride with Antonio’s Fiesta de Encanto, the first Encanto ride anywhere. In California, one part covers the first Coco ride, a boat trip through the Land of the Dead, while the Avatar project and the Avengers Campus expansion get parts of their own. Four parts go abroad. Disneyland Paris is building a Lion King land whose flume drops 52 feet beneath Pride Rock, and Shanghai Disneyland finished the track on its Spider-Man coaster in June. Hong Kong Disneyland cleared its old Tomorrowland Stage for a Spider-Man ride. Disneyland Abu Dhabi, announced in May 2025, will be built, owned and run by the Abu Dhabi company Miral, with Walt Disney Imagineering leading the design.

Movies and television get their own roundups. The film part walks through the Friday showcase studio by studio, from Avengers: Doomsday on Dec. 18, 2026, with Robert Downey Jr. as Doctor Doom, to Coco 2 in November 2029. Two parts go deeper. Incredibles 3 is dated June 16, 2028, with Peter Sohn directing and Edna Mode front and center in the first-look art, and the live-action Tangled is set for March 31, 2028, with Teagan Croft as Rapunzel and Kathryn Hahn as Mother Gothel. Edna has her own tribute, too. The television part separates shows that got real release dates from ones that only got a booth on the show floor, and an early August review looks at Descendants: Wicked Wonderland, which Disney+ said became its most-streamed title worldwide after its July 16 premiere.

The weekend closed with eleven new Disney Legends, among them Bob Iger, Anne Hathaway, Dwayne Johnson, Lin-Manuel Miranda and the Jonas Brothers, and one part goes through the whole class. Another counts the eight anniversaries Disney marked, from Alice in Wonderland at 75 to Zootopia at 10. If you want the weekend in the order it happened, start with the live guide, which links to everything else. If all you want to know is when a ride opens, the parks roundup, Disney Parks at D23 2026, keeps every project’s status in one place.

The bottom line

Five weeks on, the dated releases are the ones you can plan around. Marvel's VisionQuest arrives on Disney+ on Oct. 14, 2026, and the third season of Percy Jackson and the Olympians follows there on Nov. 20. In theaters, Avengers: Doomsday opens Dec. 18. The 2027 calendar holds Ice Age: Boiling Point on Feb. 5, Jon Favreau's Oswald the Lucky Rabbit series on Disney+ on Feb. 17, Star Wars: Starfighter on May 28, the Bluey movie on Aug. 6, The New Simpsons Movie on Sept. 3 and Frozen 3 on Nov. 24. Then 2028 brings the live-action Tangled on March 31, the X-Men film on May 5, Lilo & Stitch 2 on May 26 and Incredibles 3 on June 16. None had moved as of Sept. 24.

Five parts of the series now carry dated corrections or updates. The Tropical Americas part and the parks roundup, Disney Parks at D23 2026, have notes on what changed in September, which is also below. The television part now uses the title Disney revealed at D23, The New Simpsons Movie. The Edna Mode tribute from July has an update naming Peter Sohn as director of Incredibles 3, with Brad Bird, who directed the first two films, producing. The Legends part dropped two counts Disney does not publish.

The bigger change is Tropical Americas. On Sept. 11, Tom Bricker of Disney Tourist Blog reported that Disney had taken the year out of the land's description in the Coming to the Parks section of DisneyWorld.com. It used to say "Get ready to journey to an 11-acre, immersive land in 2027," and it now says "Prepare for your journey to an 11-acre land." Bricker also wrote that Disney did not repeat the 2027 opening year during the D23 parks showcase. BlogMickey reported that 2027 still appears on the Disney Experiences page of upcoming projects and on the Disney Parks Blog, and said its understanding is that the plan is still to open in 2027. Disney has not announced a delay or explained the change. Bricker expects the land to open in stages, with two-thirds of it open in 2027 and the Encanto ride likely slipping into 2028, and that is his estimate, not Disney's.

Disney also dated a few smaller park projects. A refreshed Carousel of Progress at Magic Kingdom starts in late spring 2027, with Jamie Lee Curtis and Bryan Cranston voicing the parents. At Disneyland, the Remember... Dreams Come True fireworks and an updated World of Color return in February 2027. The Magic Happens parade follows that summer. The Coco ride, the Villains land, Piston Peak and Avatar still have no official opening date, and neither do the projects in Paris, Shanghai, Hong Kong and Abu Dhabi. Any year you see attached to them comes from outside analysts: Bricker puts Coco somewhere between late 2028 and summer 2029, and Inside the Magic has suggested 2029 to 2031 for the Villains land. Fan outlets also list 2027 for the Paris Lion King flume and the Shanghai Spider-Man coaster, which neither park has confirmed. At Disney California Adventure, Mike & Sulley to the Rescue! is scheduled to close in 2027, and many fans expect the Avatar project to take its space, though Disney has not said so. In Florida, the Monsters, Inc. door coaster keeps rising over Hollywood Studios, and WDW News Today photographed roof structures on its show building on Sept. 21.

Abu Dhabi is furthest from a date. Disney has shown only concept art and has not confirmed that construction has started. On the Aug. 5, 2026, earnings call, with conflict in the Middle East raising questions, Chief Financial Officer Hugh Johnston said Disney is fully committed to seeing it through, and the company's next quarterly earnings report is the next scheduled chance for an update.

Josh D'Amaro, who took over as Disney's chief executive from Bob Iger on March 18, 2026, was running the parks division in August 2024 and announced most of these park projects himself from the same Honda Center stage.

Editor written. AI used for spelling and grammar only.

Written by Todd Ruffner-Schoenfeld Editor in chief. A knack for the fine print, and likes it.

Todd Ruffner-Schoenfeld has spent his working life being handed things he did not yet understand. He started at the bottom, a developer in a bullpen, and worked his way up to running IT. The places were a strange assortment: consulting firms, accounting firms, a biotech startup, a tech startup in Silicon Valley and, of all places, Chiquita. Four small businesses of his own along the way. The work never really changed. Get into something unfamiliar, find out what is actually going on, and help someone make a hard decision with it. HeadLines Decoded is that job, pointed at the news.