Something Wicked This Way Streams

After trying to kick Jimmy Kimmel off the air in a bizarre political move and losing a ton of money in the process, Disney is doing something right: pulling a VHS nightmare out of the basement. Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes is finally streaming.

If you missed this weirdo dark classic on Disney Channel reruns, here’s the gist : In a small town two boys Will Halloway and Jim Nightshade stumble upon a mysterious carnival that grants people their deepest desires — at a terrible cost. As events unravel, the boys realize that Mr. Dark (a delicious Jonathan Pryce) the sinister ringmaster has plans far darker than simple entertainment.

Released in 1983, Something Wicked is a live-action adaptation of Bradbury’s novel, with the author himself credited on the screenplay. Until now, it has been totally absent from streaming platforms, indeed it’s not publicly available at all aside from a hard-to-find 2021 Blu-ray release through the Disney Movie Club. Fans have mostly had to satisfy themselves with Bradbury’s iconic novel.

Over the decades, though, it’s picked up a modest cult reputation among Bradbury devotees, horror buffs, and fans of Disney’s darker experiments. Now, for the first time, it’s headed to a major platform: Disney+ started streaming it in the U.S. and Canada starting October 3.

Disney is usually associated with sanitized family fare and mega-franchises. Still, Something Wicked was part of a short-lived period when the studio dipped into more unsettling territory — movies that lingered like half-remembered nightmares.

Is the movie still good? Honestly, who knows? This is one of those “cult vs. canon” cases — the kind of film people whisper about and trade burned DVDs, wondering if it deserves resurrection or if it should have stayed buried. Whatever the film’s merit, the Disney+ release matters. The platform has been dragged for glaring gaps in its back catalogue, with rights issues and corporate squeamishness leaving whole chunks of history in the vault. Something Wicked surfacing now suggests they might finally be digging into those dark corners. (Condorman, another infamous Disney bomb, anyone?)

But what’s streaming isn’t Bradbury’s pure vision. Disney famously tinkered with the movie after test screenings, sanding down its quieter, melancholy edges into a jumpier, more “conventional” family thriller. They swapped out Georges Delerue’s atmospheric original score for James Horner’s more bombastic orchestration, added voice-over narration to clarify what Bradbury had left ambiguous, and spliced in new scenes — reshaping the film into something more marketable and less authentically Bradbury. What we’re getting this October isn’t just a relic of ’80s Disney; it’s a case study in how studio interference can haunt a work for decades.

And maybe that’s the real thrill: not whether the movie holds up, but that Disney’s haunted attic is finally creaking open. If Something Wicked can crawl out, maybe Watcher in the Woods or The Devil and Max Devlin aren’t far behind.