When Disney first teased Hexed at the D23 fan event in 2025, the pitch centered on an awkward teenage boy and his Type A mom stumbling into a hidden world of magic. By the time the teaser trailer dropped in June, that boy had become a girl — and according to directors Jason Hand and Fawn Veerasunthorn, that single change made the whole film stronger.
Speaking at a roundtable during the Annecy Festival, Hand explained the shift wasn’t about ticking a box. “A parent-child relationship was always the core of the story, and we found the strongest story was between a mother and a daughter,” he said. “It spoke to the idea of being a witch. It spoke to this empowerment that she was looking for.”
The reworked plot follows Billie (voiced by Hailee Steinfeld), a rebellious teen who never quite fits in at high school. On an especially rotten day, the bracelet her mother Alice (Rashida Jones) begged her to always wear slips off her wrist — and suddenly Billie starts manifesting magical powers that Alice has been quietly suppressing since her daughter was a baby.
From there, Billie tears open a portal into Hexe, a realm founded by witches who fled persecution and now live in harmony with nature. She’s greeted by a troupe of enchanted objects — a wink toward the cursed servants of Beauty and the Beast — and must master her gifts while being hunted by powerful witches who can dissolve into flocks of ravens.
If that setup sounds familiar — an outsider kid discovers they belong to a secret magical world, à la Harry Potter or Disney’s own The Owl House — the directors insist Hexed carves its own path. “This story is about a young girl who discovers her true potential, and it’s not like the usual hero’s journey where she has to do it on her own,” Veerasunthorn said. “In this film, the secret ingredient is her mom. I think that’s what sets it apart.”
The pair are also keen to distance the film from Disney’s crowded shelf of teen-girl-questions-her-family stories like Moana and Encanto. Veerasunthorn leaned on specificity as the answer. “There are archetypes of stories… I think for us, the specificity in our main character’s situation and the specificity of the magic world system that we create is going to make this something that has its own uniqueness.”
To rescue Alice, Billie has to unearth her family’s buried history — and that’s where the film gets personal for its co-director. “As a daughter who is also fortunate enough to become a mother, I really love this opportunity to tell this story that makes us curious about the side of our mothers we never thought to ask about: the joy, the mischief, and the mistakes,” Veerasunthorn said. “A big part of who we are maybe started long before we were born.”
Hexed arrives in theaters on November 25.
