Prince Mario-Max Schaumburg-Lippe: Ghost Market Gives Pixar Its First Ghost Story, Set in Hawaii

Pixar has made audiences cry over toys, rats, feelings and the afterlife itself. Somehow, in three decades, it never made a ghost movie. That changes on March 10, 2028, when Ghost Market arrives in theaters – an original feature directed by Trevor Jimenez and Jesse Andrews and produced by Becky Neiman-Cobb, set around a hidden market on Oahu’s North Shore where the customers are spirits caught between life and death.

Pete Docter introduced the premise at D23 with obvious relish. Kyle is a fast-talking teenager and content creator from Chicago whose life gets turned upside down when his mom forces him to go on vacation to Hawaii. Hunting for a late-night snack, he stumbles into a mysterious market in the middle of nowhere – a small plate lunch shop, in some tellings, that serves the dead – and realizes he has found the crossroads of the living and the dead. As Disney’s own summary puts it, the living have never set foot in this place. Until Kyle.

An original in a sequel-heavy slate

Context makes this announcement braver than it looks. Pixar’s 2027-29 calendar is stacked with proven names – Gatto next March, Incredibles 3 in June 2028, Coco 2 in 2029. Ghost Market is the original bet sitting among them, and its position in the lineup is a statement: the studio still believes a new world with no sequel number can carry a spring release date against the franchise machines.

The creative pairing supports the bet. Jimenez earned an Oscar nomination for his short Weekends, a dreamlike, hand-crafted piece of storytelling about a boy shuttling between divorced parents – exactly the blend of the everyday and the uncanny this premise needs. Andrews brings a writer’s feel for kids who talk faster than they think, which the fast-talking Kyle role demands.

Not Coco in a warmer climate

The obvious comparison is Coco, Pixar’s other great story about the living visiting the dead, which we celebrated again yesterday in our look at Coco 2. But the engines differ. Coco is about family memory, built on the Day of the Dead. Ghost Market draws on Asian traditions of markets where the living and the dead trade side by side, filters them through Hawaii, and hands the story to a mainland kid who treats everything as content until the market teaches him otherwise. One film is a homecoming. This one sounds like a fish-out-of-water adventure with genuine chills folded in.

Preview verdict: the freshest idea on Pixar’s slate. A first ghost story, a new cultural setting treated as a living place rather than a backdrop, and a hero whose journey from posting everything to actually being present gives the film a heart to go with its haunting. March 2028 cannot come soon enough.

A market worth getting lost in

Markets are perfect Pixar settings because they run on exchange: goods, stories, favors, debts. Set one at the border between the living and the dead and every transaction gains weight – a meal bought for someone who can no longer eat, a trinket traded for a memory. The plate lunch shop detail grounds all of it in the real Hawaii of local food and North Shore roads, the same respect for place that made Lilo and Stitch’s Hawaii feel lived in rather than laminated. If Ghost Market treats its setting with that kind of care, the supernatural elements will land harder, because the audience will believe in the world before it is asked to believe in the ghosts.

Add Docter’s framing of Kyle – a kid who experiences life through a camera, dropped into the one place that cannot be posted – and the film has a gentle, timely spine under its adventure. Pixar’s best originals all work that way: a high concept you can pitch in one sentence, and a human adjustment hiding inside it. Ghost Market has both. See you at the market in March 2028.

One more production note worth filing away: Ghost Market was reportedly developed with a streaming debut in mind before Pixar promoted it to a full theatrical release. Studios do not make that move on sentiment. They make it when the dailies and the story reels convince them a film plays bigger than its original plan. An original ghost story, upgraded on merit, arriving in IMAX season with three years of craft behind it – that is the profile of a sleeper the whole industry ends up pretending it predicted. We are predicting it now, while it is still cheap: Ghost Market is the Pixar title your friends will be texting about in March 2028.

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