Square Enix and Disney closed the Disney Entertainment Showcase at D23 2026 with the one thing Kingdom Hearts fans have been asking for since the game was announced back in 2022: a date. Kingdom Hearts IV is targeting late 2027, and it is coming to PS5, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch 2 and PC via Steam and the Epic Games Store. That is still a long wait, but it is the first time Tetsuya Nomura's team has put a year on the board at all.
The window arrived attached to a trailer built almost entirely around one new world - and it is a Pixar one. Kingdom Hearts IV is going to Coco.
The Land of the Dead is a Kingdom Hearts world now
The Coco segment opens the way the film does, with Papa Hector laying out the rules of the place: the dead persist in the afterlife only as long as someone in the living world still remembers them. Forget them, and they experience the Final Death. For a series whose entire emotional engine is people being erased and pieced back together - Nobodies, Replicas, data ghosts, the whole Xehanort filing cabinet - it is an almost suspiciously perfect fit. Kingdom Hearts has been circling this exact idea for twenty years without ever having a world that said it out loud.
Mechanically, the trailer shows Miguel performing to a crowd when Heartless start pouring into the plaza. Sora drops in wearing the same sort of outfit, with calavera face paint, and the Keyblade he pulls is styled to the world - guitar body, marigold gold, sugar-skull detailing. He and Papa Hector fight through toward the Casa de la Cruz. The command menu sits in the corner of the footage, so this is a real gameplay build rather than a pre-rendered sizzle.
Mickey, Donald and Goofy are looking for Sora - and they asked Hades
The other half of the trailer is what the fanbase will pull apart frame by frame. King Mickey, Donald and Goofy are back, and their thread in this game is a search party: they are trying to work out where Sora actually went. The trailer shows them consulting Hades, of all people, about his whereabouts - a very funny place to start an investigation and a very Kingdom Hearts one.
The extended cut that went up after the showcase goes further than the stage version did. It includes action sequences where you play as Donald and Goofy directly, plus an exploration segment following King Mickey as he hunts for clues. Kingdom Hearts III kept the trio mostly locked into Sora's party; IV looks like it is splitting the campaign across them.
There is also a quieter detail that will matter more than the Coco reveal to anyone following the Quadratum plot: while Sora is in Quadratum, he can apparently see the outlines of Donald and Goofy. They are separated across whatever boundary Quadratum represents, but the connection is not fully severed. Strelitzia and Sigurd, both carried over from Kingdom Hearts Union Chi, were confirmed to appear as well.
And there's an animated series coming
Separately, Disney greenlit an animated Kingdom Hearts series for Disney Channel and Disney+. It is being developed alongside Nomura and Square Enix, and the pitch is explicitly not a scene-for-scene adaptation of the games - it will tell a new story in the same universe. Given that a straight adaptation of Kingdom Hearts' plot would be an act of violence against television, that is probably the correct call. The D23 panel itself was framed as a 25th anniversary retrospective, with cast and creative staff on stage.
What this actually tells us
Late 2027 is a soft target and everyone should treat it that way; this is a series with a long history of windows sliding. The more useful signal is the platform list. Kingdom Hearts IV shipping day-and-date on Switch 2 alongside PS5 and Xbox Series X|S is a real change from Kingdom Hearts III, which spent years as a PS4 and Xbox One title before the back catalogue trickled onto Nintendo hardware as cloud versions. Whatever engine work Square Enix has been doing, it is treating Nintendo's box as a first-class platform this time.
The next question is how many more worlds are in the box, and whether the Pixar half of Disney's catalogue is now fully in play. Coco is the first Pixar world announced for IV. It is very unlikely to be the last.
