Coven Academy premieres October 1. A boycott campaign started back in August.
Some context.
Look, Freeform's 31 Nights of Halloween lineup is basically the October calendar for a lot of families. It is where Hocus Pocus lives. Where The Nightmare Before Christmas runs on repeat. Where an entire generation first found Halloweentown.
The list drops, everybody screenshots it, and October gets planned around it.
This year, there is a new title on it, and it showed up with an argument already attached.
Coven Academy hits Freeform on October 1 as part of day one, with the full season landing on October 2 on Disney+, Hulu, and Freeform on Demand.
Perfect fit for the season. And before a single episode has aired, an advocacy group is telling parents to skip it entirely.
The Disney+ Show Itself
Secret school. New Orleans.
The series follows young witches and warlocks as they learn to control powers they have just discovered, while a mysterious force closes in on them. Disney's own description promises supernatural wars, forbidden love interests, and dangerous desires.
Rated PG-V.
New Orleans is extremely well-traveled ground for this genre, and a magic boarding school there drops Coven Academy into a lineage running straight through The Vampire Diaries, The Originals, and decades of Southern gothic aimed squarely at teenagers.
October release. Obviously. This is Halloween programming built as Halloween programming.
The Objection
One Million Moms issued an alert in August, urging parents to avoid it.
Their argument is that Disney is pushing witchcraft on families, particularly tweens and teens, and keeps embracing witches, warlocks, and sorcery while promoting what the group describes as secular worldviews to young viewers.
The alert calls the show a teen drama, or a teen soap opera, and describes the trailer as featuring teenagers with anger issues, witch sisterhood, teen romance, and vampires. It also objects to the teaser using “Brutal” by Olivia Rodrigo, pointing to the artist's public support for Planned Parenthood.
The position is openly religious. The alert cites Isaiah 8:19-22 and Deuteronomy 18:10-11, passages the group reads as warning against witchcraft in any form.
They want supporters to sign a pledge not to support Disney or the show, then share the alert by email and across social media.
The Response
The pushback keeps coming back to the same point. Precedent.
Disney has been making content about witches for a very long time. Hocus Pocus is a Halloween fixture in an enormous number of households, plenty of them religious. Wizards of Waverly Place ran four seasons on Disney Channel and got a sequel. Bedknobs and Broomsticks came out in 1971. The Sword in the Stone came out in 1963.
Parents who are not concerned tend to make the same argument. Kids understand it as fantasy, the same way watching a dragon does not convince anybody that dragons are real.
There is also a practical piece. This thing is rated PG-V and marketed openly as a supernatural teen drama. Nothing about it is disguised. Any parent who does not want their kid watching a show about witches has every piece of information they need before hitting play.
Where Parents Actually Are
Most of the reaction has been neither agreement nor dismissal. It has been some version of use your own judgment.
Which is fair. Parents draw lines in different places, and a line that works in one house does not automatically carry over to the next. Plenty of strict households still ran Hocus Pocus every single October. Plenty of others have specific rules about supernatural content.
Both are legitimate calls.
The suggestion that keeps surfacing is just to wait. It premieres on October 1 on Freeform and on October 2 on streaming. Watch an episode and decide from there instead of deciding based on a trailer and an alert.
Why It Is Always Disney
Disney sits in a strange position in these fights.
The company makes everything from preschool programming to prestige adult drama, and every bit of it carries the same name. A Freeform teen drama is aimed at a completely different audience than a Disney Junior show, but both get filed under Disney.
That turns the company into a recurring target for organized campaigns in a way that other networks producing nearly identical content usually are not. Freeform has always programmed older than Disney Channel, and 31 Nights of Halloween has carried plenty of PG-13 and horror-adjacent titles over the years.
None of that resolves the actual disagreement, which is about values and not facts. It does explain why this exact fight keeps coming back around.
The Disney+ Details
Coven Academy premieres October 1 on Freeform, opening day one of 31 Nights of Halloween.
Full season drops October 2 on Disney+, Hulu, and Freeform on Demand.
Rated PG-V.
For anyone building an October watch list, it falls within the same window as everything else. Whether it makes your list is a household decision.
