Kingdom Hearts, Square Enix’s Disney x Final Fantasy crossover, has been around so long it’s surprising we haven’t gotten some kind of animated series or film before now. Things got close at one point about 20 years ago, and you can find a rough animatic of the pilot featuring the original game’s voice talent. But according to the rumors, something on a much bigger scale might be in the works over at Disney: an animated theatrical film.
The source of this is Disney-centric outlet The DisInsider. Site founder Skyler Shuler wrote about the Kingdom Hearts movie in a mailbag post, saying sources had told the site a film adaptation of the crossover RPGs could be heading to theaters in the future. The project started as something that would be released on the Disney+ streaming service, but The DisInsider says more recently it has heard the goal was to have something on the big screen. This lines up with another report from film industry insider DanielRPK, who claimed a Kingdom Hearts adaptation was in the works at Disney on April 26. However, according to The DisInsider, nothing has been greenlit. So this may still be another animated Kingdom Hearts project that goes nowhere.
The notion of a Kingdom Hearts movie meant for general audiences is hard to imagine, after all, following two decades of the series spinning its own complex lore. Even if it started from the beginning and could ease viewers into the Disney world-jumping idea, I still have a hard time picturing each Disney world getting adequate amounts of screen time in roughly 90 minutes. They could go the Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children route of throwing any notion of capturing a general audience out the window and make something that requires established knowledge, but Disney doesn’t seem like it would take that kind of risk these days.
While the movie sounds like it’s in the early stages of development, we do know what’s next for the Kingdom Hearts games. Kingdom Hearts IV was revealed in 2022 and seems to expand the series’ already expansive multiverse into something that resembles the real world. We don’t know what form the Disney crossover worlds will take, but the series will have a lot more material to work with as Disney has released several animated movies in the past decade that Kingdom Hearts has yet to touch.
