Pixar’s Best Movie of the 2010s Is Having a Huge Moment
Disney Lorcana is just the start of Coco's franchise treatment
For a company that made its name telling stories meant to endure for generations, Disney sometimes feels strangely eager to move on, even from its biggest movies. New characters become theme-park regulars and merchandise mainstays, but there is always another new movie or live-action adaptation of a classic waiting to take their place. Unless a movie becomes a franchise in itself like Frozen or Toy Story, it often recedes into the ever-growing Disney library, fondly remembered and watched countless times on Disney Plus by children, but rarely revisited.
That seemed to be the fate awaiting Coco, arguably Pixar’s greatest movie of the 2010s. Nearly nine years after its theatrical release, Miguel’s journey through the Land of the Dead remains one of the studio’s most visually spectacular and emotionally devastating stories. But unlike Inside Out, The Incredibles, or Finding Nemo, it spent most of the following decade as a standalone movie. That is finally beginning to change.
During a press preview attended by Polygon, Disney Lorcana publisher Ravensburger officially revealed the first Coco cards coming to the trading card game — which were previously hinted at back in January before the launch of Winterspell. They will appear as part of Hyperia City, a music-themed expansion launching at prerelease events on Oct. 16, before becoming widely available on Oct. 23. But that’s just the beginning. Miguel Rivera, Héctor, and even Ernesto de la Cruz are about to have a busy few years.
Coco finally comes to Disney Lorcana
The expansion takes place in the titular Hyperia City, a new Lorcana setting where art, technology, magic, and — most importantly — music converge. Powerline (from A Goofy Movie) performs at the city’s stadium. Goofy – Dancing Superstar has the Singer ability and strengthens other Singers when he quests, incorporating the set’s musical theme into its gameplay as well as its artwork.
All this emphasis on music makes Hyperia City a natural place for Coco to become a part of Lorcana. Plenty of popular Disney movies feature music — Frozen, Encanto, and Moana, to name a few prominent examples — but no other film emphasize music quite like Coco. The new cards shown to Polygon put that on prominent display.
Mama Coco – Visiting the Park gains additional lore whenever one or more cards are placed into your discard pile from your deck. The ability gives her greater value as memories accumulate, an appropriate mechanic for a character whose fading memory nearly erases her father’s existence.
Ernesto de la Cruz – Ruthless Musician presents a much more aggressive interpretation of the movie. When played, Ernesto can immediately banish another character with the Singer ability. In a sense, he is once again eliminating his competition — even if that means Mickey Mouse himself.
The set also transforms the movie’s most important song into one of its most thematically significant cards. Remember Me allows players to use characters from their discard pile for the rest of the turn. Those characters enter exerted, and the effect cannot be used on multiple characters with the same name, but it still offers the opportunity to recover a large number of characters so long as you have the ink. That transforms “Remember Me” from a song about missing someone you love into a recursion tool that’s both mechanically powerful and almost painfully faithful to the movie.
Everyone Knows Juanita, meanwhile, is a promotional song card that features Héctor performing alongside Chicharrón. It ordinarily draws two cards, but draws three instead if the player has at least 10 cards in their discard pile — again positioning the discard pile as Lorcana’s own little Land of the Dead.
Hyperia City is made up of several original neighborhoods. There’s Old Towne Hyperia, the Greenway, Kingswell Port, and the futuristic Gearwheel. But one entire section of the city in the southwest is the Marigold District, which Ravensburger confirmed was inspired by Coco. The Marigold Bridge stretches across the district’s western canals, drawing its name and likeness from the glowing bridge that connects the Land of the Living and the Land of the Dead.
Welcome back to the Land of the Dead
Coco’s arrival in Lorcana would be noteworthy on its own, but it instead feels like the opening act for a new era. The most prominent part of this resurgence is Kingdom Hearts 4. The first trailer for Square Enix’s long-awaited sequel released in 2022 showcased Quadratum, a disconcertingly realistic city described within the series as an “afterworld” belonging to another plane of existence. Sora arrives there after abusing the Power of Waking to rewrite events and save his friends at the end of Kingdom Hearts 3. He’s sort of dead — but not really. He’s just been removed from his own reality and deposited somewhere nobody can reach him.
That made Coco an obvious thematic match for the sequel, even before Disney officially confirmed it. Both stories revolve around people stranded on the wrong side of the boundary between life and death. Both also treat memory as something powerful enough to preserve a person — or erase them entirely.
The extended KH4 trailer shown at D23 in August revealed the Land of the Dead as the game’s first confirmed Disney world. The footage recreates portions of Coco, including Héctor performing “Everyone Knows Juanita” before Chicharrón experiences his Final Death. It also shows Sora traveling and fighting alongside Miguel and Héctor, complete with a new skeletal appearance and a Keyblade resembling a guitar.
Ravensburger also acknowledged during its press preview that Disney’s theme parks served as inspiration for Hyperia. Meanwhile, Disney is developing the first theme-park attraction based on Coco for Disney California Adventure. The attraction was first announced at D23 in 2024, and an update at this year’s D23 confirmed construction is well underway. “The attraction storyline will pick up a year after the events of the original film,” the official Disney Parks Blog post reads. “The queue, which will begin in Pixar Pier next to Inside Out Emotional Whirlwind, welcomes you to a ‘casa museo’ dedicated to the music of Miguel’s great-great-grandfather, Héctor Rivera.” The attraction itself is a boat ride through Héctor’s memories of the Land of the Dead, emphasizing the characters, music, and Mexican culture from the movie.
And then there is Coco 2. Disney officially announced the sequel in March 2025, although Pixar was still in the earliest stages of developing it at the time. Disney has confirmed few details about the sequel, but an August 2026 report indicates that it will focus on Miguel in his teenage years while Ernesto de la Cruz returns to get revenge. It is currently scheduled for a release on Nov. 21, 2029.
Taken together, Disney is investing a lot in Coco as a budding franchise, expanding it across film, video games, tabletop gaming, and even the theme parks. That sort of attention is usually reserved for tentpole series like Frozen or Moana, rather than a Pixar movie that’s remained mostly untouched for almost a decade. The story of Coco puts so much emphasis on the importance of not being forgotten and honoring one’s legacy. At long last, it appears that Disney itself is doing just that with Coco.