Disney has officially moved forward with Stepsisters, a live-action film that puts Cinderella’s Anastasia and Drizella at the center of the story instead of the sidelines. The studio announced on March 24, 2026, that director Akiva Schaffer is attached to helm the project, with writers Dan Gregor and Doug Mand reworking a script originally written by Michael Montemayor.
Schaffer, Gregor, and Mand are not strangers to each other or to Disney. The three worked together on the Emmy-winning Disney+ film Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers in 2022 and then teamed up again for Paramount’s Naked Gun reboot last year. They have a clear comedic rhythm together, and the way the trades describe this project, as a “comedic take” on the stepsisters, makes it sound like the same energy they brought to Chip ‘n Dale, rather than a straight dramatic retelling.
Ali Bell is producing through Party Over Here, the production company Schaffer runs alongside Lonely Island’s Andy Samberg and Jorma Taccone. Disney Live Action EVP Jessica Virtue and creative exec Cady Stark are overseeing the project on the studio side.
Disney has not released plot details yet, and it has not confirmed whether Cinderella herself will actually appear in the film. What is confirmed is that Anastasia and Drizella are the focus, told from their perspective rather than as background villains in someone else’s story. The characters were previously played by Holliday Grainger and Sophie McShera in Disney’s 2015 live-action Cinderella alongside Lily James. No casting has been announced for the new film.
This project has actually been in development longer than most people realize. The first version of a stepsister’s spinoff surfaced in 2021, when Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo were attached to write a musical script. That version never moved forward. Gregor and Mand are now rewriting Montemayor’s script, which means this is at least the third iteration of the concept. Whether the musical element carried over from the Wiig/Mumolo version is unknown.
Disney is not the only studio making a stepsister’s Cinderella film in 2026. Netflix has an animated movie called Steps in the pipeline — also told from the perspective of Cinderella’s stepsisters, with Ali Wong and Stephanie Hsu voicing the leads, directed by Alyce Tzue and Raya and the Last Dragon co-director John Ripa. In that film, one stepsister accidentally turns the other into a frog after stealing a magic wand at the Royal Ball. It is produced by Amy Poehler and has a 2026 release window.
So by the end of 2026, audiences could have two completely different films reframing the same two characters, one animated on Netflix, one live-action from Disney. That is a strange collision, and neither studio appears to be slowing down to let the other go first.
The 2015 live-action Cinderella earned strong reviews and grossed over $540 million worldwide. It is one of the cleaner success stories in Disney’s entire live-action slate. Revisiting that world makes obvious business sense. But the decision to center the stepsisters also fits a broader pattern Disney has been developing for years — telling stories from the villain’s point of view, or at least complicating what “villain” means. Maleficent did it with Sleeping Beauty. Cruella did it with 101 Dalmatians. Stepsisters is the next entry in that lineage, and importantly, Disney has already done some of that work in its own animated sequels. In Cinderella II: Dreams Come True from 2002, Anastasia was already given a redemption arc. That precedent exists inside the Disney canon. This film just gets to bring it to a much larger stage.
No release date has been set, and the film is in early development with the script still being worked on. Disney’s next live-action release is Moana in July 2026, and a live-action Tangled is also in development. Stepsisters is somewhere behind both of those on the production timeline.
For Cinderella fans, this is genuinely interesting news. The stepsisters have always been the most dramatically rich characters in that story, two people who were clearly miserable themselves and took it out on someone else. There is a real movie in that idea when the right team gets hold of it. Whether Schaffer and company are that team is the question. Based on what they did with Chip ‘n Dale, I think they might be.
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