Yesterday, Disney released a new trailer for Hexed, the next movie in its animated canon coming to theaters on November 25. It stars Hailee Steinfeld as Billie, a teenage girl who discovers she has magical powers and then finds a world of witches and wizards where she can finally belong. I’m not really here to make any snap judgments about the film as a whole, but when watching the trailer, I couldn’t help but notice that there’s something a bit off about the way the action is framed. It turns out I wasn’t alone, as several fans have pointed out that, rather than making creative use of all the space within the frame, the movie seems deliberately staged to keep the focus in the center of the screen. What would motivate such a choice? Many fans assume it’s so that clips from Hexed can be effectively shared on vertical-screen video apps like TikTok and Instagram.
In the modern age, a lot of movies and TV shows get promoted on social media. Social media apps like TikTok and Instagram are constantly feeding people videos that aren’t just from the companies trying to market movies like Hexed, but also from fans who make edits using clips of characters they like, set to viral sounds and songs. As such, big companies like Disney will release vertical versions of their trailers, typically cropping shots so they can communicate a scene to a viewer while leaving much of the original widescreen image on the cutting room floor. The scenes in Hexed’s trailer, meanwhile, wouldn’t require someone to leave out much in the way of important detail or action to present them in a vertical format, as almost every shot seems deliberately crafted to keep characters in the center. Fans have already cropped the trailer for the typical vertical aspect ratio you’ll see on TikTok or Instagram, and yeah, the bulk of the video is intact and readable.
Mucho se habla de Hexed mantiendo su punto focal al centro para que sea fácil crear clips en vertical sin perder información y pues… Sí.
Decidí editar el trailer en dicho formato y de las tomas solo unas 3 no están centradas.No sé ustedes pero esto me parece muy triste. pic.twitter.com/Nzj7hzo9fD
— Daniel San GMR ᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷ (@DanielSanGMR) June 18, 2026
Compare the trailer to the one for Dreamworks’ upcoming animated film Forgotten Island, and you can see how the latter is using more of the screen space to tell the story. Yeah, there are definitely centered shots that would look fine on an Instagram reel, but there’s also a larger variety of approaches to shot composition.
look at the difference man i’m crying pic.twitter.com/qg7eNyQxKj
— ִֶָ (@mayorloftis) June 17, 2026
This isn’t entirely new for Disney, however. As some have pointed out, Elio, Pixar’s underappreciated sci-fi flop from last year, also frames characters and action in the center of the screen, which fans hypothesize is an influencer-focused shift done in the hopes of getting free viral marketing through edits on social media.
Overall, Hexed might still be a good film, though Disney’s hit rate is not what it used to be, but this approach to framing shots is a noticeable example of movies capitulating to social media and searching for possible viral hits above all else. The ubiquity of short-form vertical video on social media has ruined a lot of art and attention spans, and I hope not every Disney movie looks like this moving forward.
Sidenote: This isn’t really Disney’s fault since generative AI models are notoriously trained to try to make characters look like those in Disney and Pixar’s movies, but man, Hexed’s characters look like a lot of AI slop we’ve been seeing over the past few years. Hopefully the team can do more to differentiate itself from those videos when Frozen 3 comes to theaters next year.
