It sounds like Josh Gad’s Honey, I Shrunk The Kids reboot is dead

In 2019, before the virus, before Quibi revealed the fallibility of streaming services, before the WGA strike, when the movie and TV studios had all the money in the world and they couldn’t conceive of a future where that wasn’t the case, Disney started moving forward with a 30-years-later Honey, I Shrunk The Kids reboot. The project later took shape as a Disney+ series called Shrunk starring Josh Gad as Nick Szalinski, the son of Rick Moranis’ character Wayne Szalinski from the old movies. Original director Joe Johnston was set to return, and Disney was riding so high on the project that even Moranis—who effectively retired from acting decades ago so he could spend more time with his family—was supposedly going to show up.

But time, and the pandemic, and the streaming service gold rush, and the WGA strike make fools of us all, even Mickey Mouse, and it sounds like Shrunk just completely fell apart at some point in the last few years. That comes from Gad himself, who explained on Twitter that they were “inches from starting” on the reboot when COVID came along, and then they were “inches from starting again” when his schedule “exploded with conflicts,” and then they were “inches from starting again” when “budget got the best of us.”

Basically, it got killed by the same stuff that kills everything in show biz, except it got killed by all of it in succession. Throw in a creative differences and a main cast member getting cancelled and it would really clear the Bingo card. Gad offered a bit of hope, instructing people who still want to see Shrunk to let Disney know, but his record isn’t especially great with getting TV spin-offs made on Disney+—last February, the streaming service killed off his live-action Beauty And The Beast prequel show.

Maybe this is all for the best, though. We don’t want anyone to shrink kids so much that they end up in the quantum realm, with all of the wacky and memorable characters that live down there!