Bette Midler Breaks Silence on ‘Hocus Pocus’ Sequel Involvement

You can Bette that the stars of Hocus Pocus want in on the fun if there’s going to be a sequel. Bette Midler and Kathy Najimy opened up to Entertainment Tonight on Halloween about the possibility of their involvement in the official sequel that’s in the works at Disney+, hinting that they’d like to be involved.

“Oh my goodness, me. Oh I hope they get to me before I’m a corpse,” Midler, who starred as Winifred Sanderson in the original 1993 Halloween classic, joked. “We wanna fly again. I hope Disney+ is a big success and I hope we get to do it, because [Winifred] is of course one of my favorite characters.”

“I mean, she’s in the zeitgeist,” Midler explained. “I have met people — I’ve met grownup people, like 40 year olds, 50 year olds — who say, ‘Oh, I remember that! Hocus Pocus! I was brought up on that.’ It’s so mortifying ’cause I still look 35.”

As for whether or not she’ll be singing on, Midler, 73, said nothing was set in stone just yet, but added, “I can’t wait to read the script. We’re gonna see what happens.”

She also explained that she and her former Hocus Pocus co-stars, Najimy and Sarah Jessica Parker — still get together, and often find themselves talking about their hopes for a sequel.

“We actually talk about it whenever we see each other,” she said. “We laugh, we say, ‘Oh, wouldn’t it be great if…?’ Because all of us had pretty much the same experience on it.”

Najimy also attended Midler’s annual Halloween gala benefitting the New York Restoration Project, and opened up about possibly joining the cast of the sequel.

“I heard about it online the same time as [everyone else],” Najimy, 62, revealed. “But here’s the honest answer: Sarah and Bette and I all have a million projects and things that we’re into, so I don’t know if they’re gonna offer us [roles]. I don’t know if the worlds are going to collide so that we could all three do it at the same time.”

“But I’m happy that it’s happening, because the fans are really rabid and they really want it,” she added. “[And] if we’re not all available to star in it, I think it would be so great to do a cameo. I think that’d be really fun.”

News broke last week that Disney+ is “moving forward” with a new Hocus Pocus film, with a new writer attached to make the original cast fit into the new story — although Midler, Najimy and Parker were not yet officially attached to the project.

Photo credit: Dimitrios Kambouris / Staff / Getty