Disney Cursed Love brings spicy romantasy to Belle and the Beast
Disney Publishing announced Disney Cursed Love at D23, a romantasy webcomic line launching on Webtoon. The first story pairs Belle and the Beast with a cursed kingdom, and Disney handed it to Emily McIntire, a dark romance author who made her name on unofficial fairy tale retellings.
Disney is making a romantasy line, and it hired one of dark romance’s biggest names to start it.
At D23 in Anaheim, Disney Publishing announced Disney Cursed Love, a new webcomic series built on what the company calls its most iconic love stories. The first entry is The Curse of a Forsaken Heart, featuring Belle and the Beast, written by Emily McIntire with art by Samairu.
It launches on Webtoon first, then expands into print in 2027. Release dates are still to come.
Disney’s own description promises “seductive, action-packed romantasy adventure, entangled in dark magic, terrible curses and epic romance.” Seductive is not a word Disney usually reaches for.
What The Curse of a Forsaken Heart is about
The plot is a Disney story wrapped around a brand-new one.
Belle and the Beast, in his human form, get pulled through an enchanted stained-glass window into a magical world. Trapped there, they find the realm’s fate is tied to a princess named Emberlynne, who refused an evil sorcerer’s marriage proposal. His response was to curse the entire kingdom to live without love, and to curse anyone who enters it.
So Belle and the Beast have to find their way back to each other and help Emberlynne find her own happily ever after, or nobody gets out.
Emberlynne and a character named Lucan are McIntire’s own creations, and they’re the actual romantic center. Belle and the Beast are significant, but this is not their love story.
That detail matters more than it looks, and I’ll come back to it.
Emily McIntire built her career on dark, spicy fairy tales
Here’s why the internet reacted the way it did.
McIntire is the #1 New York Times and #1 Sunday Times bestselling author of the Never After series, six standalone dark romances that take classic fairy tales and hand the villains the happy ending. Hooked is Peter Pan. Scarred is Robin Hood. Wretched is The Wizard of Oz. Twisted is Aladdin. Crossed is The Hunchback of Notre Dame. There’s a Little Mermaid one too.
Notice how many of those Disney also made movies of.
These books are not gentle. They carry explicit content warnings, “reader discretion is advised” notices, and links to detailed trigger lists on McIntire’s site. BookTok made them a phenomenon precisely because they go places the animated versions never could.
So Disney has now officially hired the author who spent years writing unauthorized, very adult versions of stories Disney owns. Whatever else that is, it’s a decision somebody had to sign off on.
So how spicy will Disney Cursed Love actually get
Honest answer: Disney hasn’t said, and three facts point in a specific direction.
One, Disney announced no content rating for the series.
Two, the last Beauty and the Beast webcomic Disney put on Webtoon, As Old As Time: A Twisted Tale, is rated Teen (13+).
Three, and this is the one I flagged earlier, the actual romance belongs to Emberlynne and Lucan, not to Belle and the Beast.
That third point reads like deliberate insulation. Disney gets a genuine romantasy with real heat, and its own princess stays a supporting character in someone else’s love story. Belle doesn’t have to do anything Disney would rather she didn’t.
McIntire’s own pitch supports a tamer read. “Rivals to lovers, banter that betrays their feelings, a quest to break a curse, and a will they or won’t they tension that will have you screaming at them to just give in already,” she said, describing Emberlynne and Lucan.
That’s a tension-and-yearning pitch, not a scorched-earth one. Expect warmer than Disney has ever gone, cooler than McIntire usually goes, and a lot of people checking chapter one very carefully.
Romantasy and Webtoon are both enormous right now
Disney isn’t taking a flyer here. It’s arriving where the readers already are.
Romantasy, fantasy plus romance plus a guaranteed happy ending, has been the dominant force in publishing since BookTok got hold of Sarah J. Maas and Rebecca Yarros. 2026 alone brings the sixth ACOTAR book in October, with a seventh in January, and publishers have stacked the calendar all year. Waterstones, Book Riot, and roughly every bookseller alive now run dedicated romantasy lists.
Webtoon is the other half of the equation. Disney has already put more than 20 comics onto Webtoon’s vertical-scroll format, with its own dedicated section in the app, and in January the company closed a deal that included an approximately 2% equity stake in Webtoon Entertainment. The two are also building a new digital comics platform together.
More Disney titles are queued up behind Cursed Love, including Disney Villains Ursula, Star Wars Visions entries, and Gravity Falls: Lost Legends.
Put it together and the strategy is obvious. Romantasy readers are mostly adult women who read on their phones. Webtoon is a phone-first reading app. Disney has a century of love stories and, until now, no real way to sell them to that audience.
McIntire wrote it during cancer treatment
One thing from the announcement deserves to be said plainly.
McIntire shared that when Disney approached her about the project, she was two years into chemotherapy for Stage 4 breast cancer, and her creative voice had gone quiet. Dreaming up The Curse of a Forsaken Heart, she said, was the first time it came back.
“These characters and the journey they go through, both falling in love and fighting for love, reminded me why I write,” she said.
She also offered the cleanest description of why Disney picked this story to start with. “To me, Beauty and the Beast is about transformation,” McIntire said. “Recognizing that even with your flaws and fears, you’re worthy of love.”
Disney has been selling that idea since 1991. It just found a new shelf to sell it from, and hired someone who knows exactly how much the audience wants it.
Article compiled with the help of the Pirates & Princesses newsroom.
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Hat Tips:
Variety (August 15, 2026), Todd Spangler’s report on the Disney Cursed Love announcement at D23, the McIntire and Samairu credits, the synopsis, the author quotes, and the upcoming Disney Webtoon slate
Disney Publishing, the official series description and the 2027 print expansion
emilymcintire.com, McIntire’s bestseller status and the Never After series content warnings
Webtoon Entertainment (January 8, 2026), the completed Disney partnership and the approximately 2% equity stake
Webtoon, the Teen (13+) rating on the existing Disney As Old As Time: A Twisted Tale webcomic