The co creator of Disney's 2002 animated Hawaiian girl meets alien film lands both jobs on a sequel framed as a 'brand new story' rather than a follow up to the direct to video Lilo & Stitch 2.
Disney is putting the original voice of Stitch behind the camera for its live-action Lilo & Stitch sequel. Chris Sanders, who co-created the 2002 animated Lilo & Stitch and voiced the chaotic blue alien in both the original and last year's live-action remake, is set to direct the follow-up, according to Gizmodo's Morning Spoilers roundup, which cites The Hollywood Reporter as the primary source.
The hook is continuity of voice in a literal sense. Sanders is the only actor who has ever been Stitch on screen, and the dual role he is taking on — director and voice lead — makes him the single thread connecting the 2002 film, the 2025 live-action remake, and whatever this sequel becomes. The project's framing as a "brand-new story" is doing real work in the announcement. It explicitly rules out a Lilo & Stitch 2: Stitch Has a Glitch continuation, the 2005 direct-to-video follow-up that Disney is presumably trying to put some distance from.
That framing leaves an obvious question open. A "brand-new story" that also cannot reuse the original 2002 plot is a sequel with no source material to adapt, which is a different creative proposition than Disney's usual live-action playbook of remaking its animated catalog beat for beat. The 2025 Lilo & Stitch remake had a finished script to translate; a sequel that has to invent its own plot while still functioning as Lilo & Stitch is a harder pitch, and Sanders's return is the only signal in the announcement that tone and character continuity are the point rather than just the brand.
The trade press is reading the dual role as substantive rather than ceremonial for that reason. If the studio wanted a clean directorial handoff, it would have brought in a separate director and let Sanders stay on as a voice consultant. Pairing the jobs puts one person's instincts for the character at the center of the production, which is the kind of choice that usually signals a property the studio wants to protect from feeling generic.
What "brand-new story" has to justify, in other words, is more than the existence of the sequel itself. The sequel-to-remake leap — with the studio greenlighting a follow-up to a remake it just released — is itself a new template, and Sanders's dual credit is the only concrete commitment the announcement makes about how the film will feel. The open question is whether that is enough creative anchor for a property that the studio is, by its own framing, building from scratch.