Disney's live-action Tangled has its leads, and now its villain too. Milo Manheim and Teagan Croft will play Flynn Rider and Rapunzel, and per MSN's casting update, the long-rumored remake is officially underway, with Kathryn Hahn as Mother Gothel.

If you can't quite place the faces, Manheim is Disney Channel royalty from the Zombies franchise, and Croft played Raven across four seasons of Titans. It's a smart pairing on paper. Manheim's been charming that audience since Zombies premiered in 2018, which I can only describe as an eight-year smolder apprenticeship, and Croft spent four years playing a girl cooped up with a truly terrible parent, so the whole tower situation should feel like a light warm-up.

But the casting that made me sit up straight is the villain. The cast rundown lists Kathryn Hahn as Gothel, and I'd been keeping a dream-casting list for years, ranked, confident, and I'm thrilled to shred it. Hahn is the kind of casting that feels obvious only after you hear it. She spent a whole WandaVision arc playing the friendly nosy neighbor while something much worse moved underneath, and she's already had a villain musical number take over the internet once, so "Mother Knows Best" feels like it's sitting in her pocket waiting. Gothel was always the make-or-break part of this movie, the one who has to sing manipulation with a smile that never reaches the eyes. If you had money on somebody else, make the case, because I can't find one.

The 2010 Tangled is top-three Disney of this century for me, so that's where I'm coming from. The lantern sequence alone. "I See the Light" still gets me every single time, and Maximus remains the best horse in movies, a list I've never formally published but maintain mentally with great seriousness.

I've also seen every one of these remakes, The Jungle Book, Beauty and the Beast Aladdin, The Little Mermaid, most of them twice for reasons I can't defend. So I come to this one with love and a much shorter list of questions than I had last week. How does seventy feet of glowing hair read in live action without tipping into shampoo commercial? Do the Alan Menken songs survive intact? Those two are still open, and they're the fun kind of open.

Anyway, since we're on casting instincts, Jess Wingo has been telling me Croft is the real deal since her Titans days, and Jess is right about performers roughly ninety percent of the time, which I find personally inconvenient.

The MSN piece collects everything known so far on plot, the wider cast and the release timeline, and per the report, the film is set for March 2028. So I don't have to do any release-date math, which is a shame, because I had a whole chalkboard ready. What's genuinely still open is the smaller stuff: whether the remake keeps the original's PG rating or edges moodier now that actual people are holding the knives, and how many months of post-production seventy feet of glowing hair demands. In remake years, March 2028 is basically next week anyway.

Until then, the animated original is right there on Disney+, and it holds up completely. Watch the lantern scene tonight and try not to get misty. Best day ever.