Bette Midler confirms that all ‘Hocus Pocus’ stars are down for upcoming sequel

  • Oops!
    Something went wrong.
    Please try again later.

It looks like there is more trickery to be conjured from the Sanderson sisters.

On Monday, Bette Midler confirmed that the “Hocus Pocus” sequel is becoming more of a reality.

“They want to make a movie. They’ve asked us if we were interested, and, of course, all of us said ‘yeah,’” Midler, who played the wicked, buck-toothed Winifred Sanderson, told “Good Day New York.”

The Oscar-nominated, Grammy, Emmy and Tony Award winner has apparently been waiting very patiently for that particular phone call, gushing, “I’m game. I’m totally game.”

Midler, who revealed her voice was “rusty,” did mention that she is having a hard time accepting that the movie came out way back in 1993.

“It was so bizarre to have been these characters 27 years ago,” she said.

The “Wind Beneath My Wings” singer and her co-stars Sarah Jessica Parker and Kathy Najimy recently reunited to perform the virtual charity event, “In Search of the Sanderson Sisters: A Hocus Pocus Hulaween Takeover.”

Midler says the three of them immediately jumped right back into the Sanderson sisters mindset as soon as they went through hair and makeup for the big show, which she assures is a full-on production and “is not like your regular Zoom-grid show. It’s not people sitting around with their Oscars.”

“It was so bizarre, because we fell into exactly the same relationships we had and the same style of behaving on-screen that we had 27 years ago,” the Hawaii native beamed. “As if we had been off for a weekend!”

The one-hour event, streaming Oct. 30, will raise funds for New York Restoration Project (NYRP), the open space conservancy founded in 1995 by the 74-year-old superstar.

Though “Hocus Pocus” was a box office bomb when released, the critically panned movie gained a second wind via home video formats and became a cult classic after it began airing annually during the Halloween season.

The popular Disney film follows a villainous comedic trio of sister witches in Salem, Mass., who are accidentally resurrected by a teenage boy on Halloween night.

For the past five years, the Kenny Ortego-helmed film has ranked as the No. 1 film fans streamed, rented or purchased during Halloween week, according to Fandango.

This season, “Hocus Pocus” was scheduled to play 14 times during Freeform’s annual “31 Nights of Halloween” and the basic cable channel partnered with the Carvel ice cream chain to release a new Hocus Pocus Shake to celebrate the movie lineup.

There is currently no production timeline underway for the sequel but earlier this year, Deadline reported that “Hairspray” director Adam Shankman was tapped to helm “Hocus Pocus 2” for Disney+.

———

©2020 New York Daily News

Visit New York Daily News at www.nydailynews.com

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.