Pixar Sends a Kid to Eat Dinner With the Dead in Ghost Market, Its First Ever Ghost Story

A Chicago teenager wanders into a Hawaiian plate lunch shop for the deceased, and Pixar finally makes its haunted house movie.

Pete Docter walked onto the stage at the Anaheim Convention Center on August 14 and told a packed house something the studio had never said before: Pixar was making a ghost movie. The film is called Ghost Market, it arrives in March 2028, and it centers on a food delivery run gone very wrong in the middle of the Hawaiian night.

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Pixar has circled the subject of death before, but always at a careful angle. Coco sent a boy across a marigold bridge into the fully realized Land of the Dead, a bright and bureaucratic afterlife populated by skeleton relatives waiting to be remembered. Soul stranded a jazz musician’s disembodied self in a cosmic waystation called the Great Before, more accounting office than haunted house. Even Monsters, Inc. kept its supernatural creatures firmly on the side of comedy, closets and doors standing in for anything genuinely frightening. In every case, the studio built an elaborate, fully designed elsewhere for its characters to visit and, eventually, leave.

Ghost Market breaks from that pattern by refusing to build an elsewhere at all. Its dead do not live in a separate realm reached by bridge or portal. They eat dinner a few miles from a resort town, at a shop that has presumably been serving them for years without a single living customer noticing the door. The premise treats the supernatural as something adjacent to ordinary life rather than a destination, closer in spirit to ghost story folklore than to the theme park logic of an afterlife bureaucracy.

Pete Docter, Pixar’s chief creative officer, introduced the project on the D23 stage by calling it the studio’s first ghost movie in plain terms, a label the marketing materials have leaned into rather than softened. The teaser and poster both use the word ghost without qualification, a small but pointed departure for a studio that has generally filtered its darker material through gentler words like memory, spirit, or soul. Coming from the company behind Toy Story and Monsters, Inc., committing to the word ghost on a poster is itself a small statement of intent.

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The official synopsis places the story on Oahu’s North Shore, where a small plate lunch counter called ‘Ono Market caters exclusively to spirits caught between life and death. No living person has ever set foot inside, until a fast talking Chicago teenager named Kyle wanders in looking for a late night snack. According to Pixar’s own account of the pitch, Kyle eats a plate meant for the dead and accidentally turns himself into a half ghost, which sets off a chain of paranormal deliveries, shifts in a haunted kitchen, and a family entanglement that Docter described on stage as scarier than anything supernatural in the building.

The teaser that played at D23 leans into that premise visually. It is shot in a vertical, handheld style that mimics a phone camera, with Kyle narrating directly into the lens like a kid trying to build a following out of his own haunting. A bowl of noodles drifts across the frame under its own power partway through, and Kyle’s reaction lands somewhere between a scream and a laugh, which several outlets have pointed to as a preview of the tonal balance the film is chasing between genuine scares and Pixar’s usual warmth. The premise leans specifically on the idea of a hungry ghost, spirits who remain tied to the world of the living through unfinished appetite, a concept that runs through numerous Asian religious and folk traditions and shows up every year in festivals built around feeding the dead. ‘Ono Market’s entire business model, a plate lunch counter for spirits who cannot move on, reads as a fairly direct extension of that folklore, translated into the specific texture of Hawaiian food culture rather than a more generic haunted house.

That grounding in a real place matters to how the film has been pitched so far. Oahu’s North Shore is known in the real world for its surf breaks and small roadside shrimp trucks, not for horror iconography, and setting a story about the crossroads of life and death inside that specific, sun bleached geography is part of what critics have flagged as unusual for the studio. Rather than a fog shrouded cemetery or a crumbling mansion, Ghost Market’s haunted space is a plate lunch shop, a setting built around service, hospitality, and food, three things Pixar has spent three decades making warm rather than frightening.

D23 Signage And Disney Character Posters Outside The Anaheim Convention Center

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Ghost Market did not begin its life as a surprise. A Wall Street Journal report published back in March first surfaced a Pixar project under the working title Ono Ghost Market, describing it as a story pulled from Asian myths about supernatural bazaars where the living and the dead interact. That same reporting noted the project had originally been developed as an episodic series for Disney+, alongside the animated show Win or Lose, before Pixar leadership decided the idea worked better as a single feature.

By the time Docter brought it to the D23 stage five months later, the show had shed the Ono from its public title, condensing down to the simpler Ghost Market, though the fictional shop at its center still carries the original name. The film is also being described internally as Pixar’s 33rd or 34th feature depending on how the count is kept, arriving in a stretch of the release calendar that already includes Incredibles 3 and a sequel to Coco.

The D23 reveal itself did not happen in isolation. It came near the end of a nearly three hour Disney Entertainment Showcase at the Honda Center that also touched on Marvel Studios’ upcoming slate, new Star Wars projects, and a wave of Disney Animation news, with Pixar’s own segment covering fresh looks at Gatto, concept art from Incredibles 3, and the Coco 2 teaser before Docter turned to Ghost Market as the night’s surprise original title. Positioning an unannounced project at the tail end of a night stacked with known franchises is a marketing choice Pixar has used before, saving its newest swing for the moment attention is already locked in.

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Two names are attached to the director’s chair: Trevor Jimenez and Jesse Andrews, with Becky Neiman-Cobb producing. Jimenez is a familiar name inside Pixar circles. He directed the 2018 Pixar SparkShort Weekends, a wordless, semi-autobiographical short about a boy shuttling between his divorced parents’ homes that earned an Academy Award nomination for best animated short. He went on to serve as a story supervisor on Soul and co-direct an episode of the Disney+ series Win or Lose, the same show Ghost Market was once meant to sit alongside.

Andrews brings a different résumé to the pairing, having worked on this year’s Pixar release Hoppers before stepping into a co-directing role here. Pairing a director best known for a quiet, melancholic short with one coming off a broader studio comedy suggests Ghost Market is aiming to sit somewhere between those two registers: a horror premise handled with an animator’s eye for grief and family tension, wrapped in a plot mechanism built for jokes and set pieces.

Ghost Market will also mark just the second Pixar film to carry two credited directors, following Brave, a detail that has drawn its own share of attention from fans tracking how the studio structures its productions. Co-directed features at Pixar have historically signaled a production that changed hands or needed a second creative voice brought in partway through, which has fueled some speculation about how long Ghost Market has quietly been in development since that March report, though neither Pixar nor the directors have detailed the specifics of how the collaboration came together.

Becky Neiman-Cobb produces, rounding out a lead creative team built largely around people who have not yet led a Pixar feature to release on their own, a notable choice for a studio that has more often paired first time directors with a veteran producer or co-director who has already carried a film across the finish line.

Disney And Pixar’s Ghost Market Title Revealed On Stage Before A Seated Audience

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Critics covering the reveal have reached for the same reference points almost immediately. The found footage framing recalls Blair Witch style horror as filtered through a teenager’s phone, while the broader shape, a curious kid wandering into a hidden world and getting trapped there by eating something he should not have, has drawn direct comparisons to Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away. Pixar’s own marketing has not shied away from the parallel, instead framing Ghost Market as its version of that story filtered through Hawaiian plate lunch culture and the specific anxieties of a chronically online teenager.

Fans watching the teaser also zeroed in on something less intentional: Kyle’s character design bears a resemblance to Roshan, the human baby carried through 20th Century Fox’s Ice Age, prompting a wave of jokes online about Disney’s tendency toward similar looking character faces across different studios and franchises it now owns, since both properties now sit under the same corporate roof. Some fans have floated a more elaborate theory, wondering aloud whether the resemblance is a deliberate seed for a twist connecting Kyle to Roshan rather than a coincidence of character design, though nothing in Pixar’s official materials supports that reading and it remains fan speculation rather than reported fact.

Beyond the visual comparisons, several outlets have noted that the film’s premise, a curious kid entering a hidden spirit economy and having to work off a debt or obligation inside it before he can leave, echoes a structure horror and fantasy audiences have seen built around haunted businesses and supernatural service industries before, without any single film serving as a direct blueprint. What distinguishes Ghost Market so far is less the shape of that structure than the specific cultural texture wrapped around it, Hawaiian plate lunch service standing in for the more commonly seen bathhouse or diner setting other stories in this vein have used.

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Ghost Market is scheduled for a spring 2028 theatrical release, with industry reporting pointing to March 10 as the date Disney has reserved for a Pixar film that year. That puts it on a calendar already carrying The Incredibles 3 later the same year, with Coco 2 following in 2029 and Gatto arriving first, in March 2027. It continues a pattern the studio has leaned on since 2020, releasing two features in a single calendar year rather than spacing originals and sequels further apart, a rhythm previously used for Onward and Soul, Turning Red and Lightyear, and this year’s pairing of Hoppers and Toy Story 5.

Pixar has not announced a voice cast, additional character details, or further plot specifics beyond what Docter described on stage and what appears in the roughly thirty second teaser. The studio’s official page for the film currently lists only the directing and producing credits alongside the March 2028 release window, with a fuller look expected as the date approaches.

That silence around casting stands out given how far ahead of release Ghost Market was revealed. Pixar and Disney have increasingly used D23 to plant flags on projects years before their theatrical debut, giving fandoms an extended runway to build anticipation, theorize, and, in this case, immediately start comparing a new character’s face to a twenty year old animated mammoth movie. Whether that early exposure helps or dilutes the eventual release is an open question the studio will not have an answer to until closer to March 2028, when Ghost Market will need to hold its own next to Incredibles 3 rather than simply exist as a surprising line item on a convention slide.