Disney+ greenlights Selena Gomez’s Wizards Of Waverly Place revival
Gomez will make appearances in the revived series, which will focus on her old castmate David Henrie as an adult wizard
Aux News Wizards
Even as controversy continues to swirl around the legacy of Nickelodeon’s live-action teen TV shows—spurred on by the recent release of the Dan Schneider-focused docuseries Quiet On Set—their long-time rivals over at Disney Channel are making headlines of a far less depressing sort: Variety reports that Disney+ has just officially ordered a revival of late-2000s kids show Wizards Of Waverly Place, executive produced by original stars Selena Gomez and David Henrie.
The series will focus on Henrie’s character, Justin Russo, who apparently dipped out on the Wizard World—which remains, as ever, legally distinct from anything you might have read in the Harry Potter books or seen in any Harry Potter films—to raise a regular family. But, wouldn’t you know it, his sister Alex (Gomez, who’ll make appearances in the show, but is presumably too busy being Selena Gomez to sign on as a regular for a second streaming TV series) shows up with a young wizard in need of training, forcing Justin to get back in the wand-waving world. The series will co-star Janice LeAnn Brown (who audiences from a very different sect of the teen-TV-viewing world might know for playing Zendaya’s character in a couple of flashbacks in Euphoria) as Billie, Justin’s new mentee.
No word yet on whether any other members of the cast or crew of the original series—including Jake T. Austin, who played the third Russo sibling, Max, or series creator Todd J. Greenwald—will be involved in the revival project in any way. The oddest thing about the announcement, to our minds, is the timing, honestly: This feels like one of those projects Disney+ would have rolled out back in its opening days, when it was trading heavily on nostalgia to power early subscriptions; announcing it in 2024 feels a bit like playing catch-up on an already fading trend.