Kenny Ortega has told the Leonardo DiCaprio story again, and this time he put it inside a bigger idea about how he cast Hocus Pocus. “I always look for the promise,” the 76-year-old director told fans at a panel at ’90s Con in Hartford, Connecticut, on Sunday, October 18. “I don’t necessarily look for what’s in the room in terms of what a person is bringing out in terms of an audition. I’m looking deeper. I’m looking at who’s inside of that.”
Applied to the role of Max Dennison, the teenager who lights the Black-Flame Candle and brings the Sanderson sisters back to Salem, that search led him to two very different young actors. Ortega said the production “were looking at Leonardo DiCaprio” for the part before it “chose Omri Katz.”
What Ortega actually said, and what he has said before
The Hartford remarks are short on DiCaprio himself. The fuller version of the anecdote comes from an interview Ortega gave in October 2023, when he described his casting team phoning ahead before the meeting. “[My casting team] called me up and said, ‘We’re sending someone in, but you can’t have him,'” he recalled. “They said, ‘We want you to know who he is, we want you to meet him, he’s agreed to come in to meet you, but he can’t do the role. He’s being offered a movie with [Robert] De Niro and What’s Eating Gilbert Grape.'”
He met him anyway. DiCaprio, by Ortega’s account, arrived uneasy about taking up a slot he could not fill, and he was never asked to read Max’s lines. “We shared a sandwich together. He was super cool. When he walked out, I called my casting agents and I said, ‘You’re murdering me, here.'”
DiCaprio has addressed his side once, in 2014, saying Disney offered him “more money than I ever dreamed of” for the part. He passed and went after What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, which earned him his first Oscar nomination, for best supporting actor. So “nearly cast” is a fair summary of a real offer that was turned down, not a lost screen test or a last-minute swap.
The new detail from Hartford is less about DiCaprio than about the actors who did get the jobs. Ortega said that “there was no child actor working in the industry anywhere in the country that could hold a candle to” Thora Birch, who played Max’s sister Dani, and he said each cast member came to set with something of their own. “It wasn’t going to be about me always guiding, directing, suggesting. They all came to the party every single day and brought so much with them, each and every one of them,” he said.
Katz and Birch were on the panel with him, along with Jason Marsden, the voice of the cat Thackery Binx, Vinessa Shaw, who played Allison, and Larry Bagby and Tobias Jelinek, the bullies Ice and Jay. Ortega said it was his first time with the group since the film’s 25th anniversary in 2018.
A flop that became an October fixture
Hocus Pocus was Ortega’s second film as a director, a year after the musical Newsies, and neither did well in theaters. Disney released it in North America on July 16, 1993, a midsummer date the producer has said was meant to catch children out of school. It opened in fourth place with $8.1 million, behind Jurassic Park, In the Line of Fire and The Firm, and fell out of the top ten within two weeks.
The numbers since then tell a different story. Against a $28 million budget, the film’s lifetime theatrical gross of $53.2 million works out to about 1.9 times its cost, and that total includes decades of anniversary and pandemic-era re-releases, so the 1993 run on its own was weaker still. Its real money came from television and home video: annual October broadcasts on Disney’s cable channels and more than $1 million in DVD sales each October after the 2002 disc release.
A short timeline of how a summer misfire became a Halloween franchise:
- 1993: theatrical release in July; Katz plays Max after DiCaprio declines.
- 2014: DiCaprio speaks publicly about turning the role down.
- 2018: 25th-anniversary television special; the first week of anniversary airings averages 8.2 million viewers.
- 2020: a pandemic re-release in 2,570 theaters takes $1.9 million in one weekend, second only to Tenet.
- 2022: Hocus Pocus 2, directed by Anne Fletcher rather than Ortega, premieres on Disney+ on September 30.
- May 2026: Hocus Pocus 3 is announced with Bette Midler, Sarah Jessica Parker and Kathy Najimy returning.
That third film is the reason casting stories keep surfacing every fall: each round of anniversary panels feeds interest in a franchise Disney is still building. Ortega’s own sign-off in Hartford was simpler. “My heart is full,” he told the room. “Thank you all for being here and supporting this movie through the years.”
Further reading
Image: nagi usano from Tokyo, Japan, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
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