Warner Bros. has announced that children's fantasy film The Witches is set for release on October 16, 2020, with Anne Hathaway set to star in the main antagonist role as the Grand High Witch.

The film is being directed by Robert Zemeckis, who also wrote the screenplay.

Based on the children's novel by Roald Dahl, The Witches is about a little boy who stumbles across a conference of witches while staying with his grandmother at a hotel, and gets transformed into a mouse by the Grand High Witch. The young protagonist learns that the witches have a horrifying plan to turn children into mice en masse, and must work to stop them before it's too late.

The Witches was previously adapted by Don't Look Now director Nicolas Roeg in 1990, and those who watched that movie as children were left pretty scarred by its dark plot and the horrifying make-up on the unmasked witches. In that movie the Grand High Witch was played by Anjelica Huston, while Rowan Atkinson played the role of the hotel's mouse-hating manager, Mr. Stringer.

Source: Press Release