Published
In March 2019, a single announcement did three things at once: named the Maleficent sequel (Mistress of Evil), unveiled its artwork, and (the genuinely unusual part) moved its release date seven months earlier. The searches that still arrive ask for the franchise’s dates, so this page keeps the complete calendar, moves included.
The dates, in full
Maleficent opened May 30, 2014 — Disney’s dark-fairy revision of Sleeping Beauty, and the film that proved Angelina Jolie’s marquee power intact: nearly three-quarters of a billion worldwide, the studio’s live-action-remake era’s early landmark. Maleficent: Mistress of Evil followed October 18, 2019. Its date has a story of its own: the sequel had sat on a May 2020 placeholder, and the March 2019 announcement jumped it forward to October 2019 (studios delay constantly and accelerate almost never), which made the move national trade news. Disney offered no detailed reasoning; the practical reading is calendar strategy, sliding a four-quadrant fantasy into the autumn corridor its remakes had begun to own while clearing the 2020 summer for heavier traffic.
The sequel the date carried
Mistress of Evil delivered the franchise’s oddest pivot: a fairy-versus-human war film, with Michelle Pfeiffer’s Queen Ingrith as the true villain, a hidden nation of dark fey (Chiwetel Ejiofor chief among them) and a wedding-massacre plot the reviews found either admirably strange or simply cluttered. Jolie and Elle Fanning’s returning double act kept the film watchable by consensus; the box office told the sharper story, a steep drop from the original, soft domestically, rescued to respectability abroad. The accelerated date, whatever its logic, did not repeat 2014.
The third film, filed honestly
“Maleficent 3” has existed as quotes since the sequel’s press tour — Jolie’s openness on record, periodic development reports since — and as of this page’s last check it has no date, no director and no production start. By the standard this site applies, that is discussed-and-unscheduled: a warmer file than the vanished projects the tracker shelves, but a file in the same cabinet until a date exists. The franchise’s calendar, complete as of today: two films, one famous acceleration, and a third entry that remains, in the only phrasing a dates page can responsibly use, unscheduled.