Netflix has released the first official group photo of the four leads headlining its upcoming live-action “Scooby-Doo” series, giving fans their earliest look at the reimagined Mystery Inc. crew.
Mckenna Grace is playing Daphne Blake. Tanner Hagen takes on Shaggy Rogers. Maxwell Jenkins steps into Fred Jones’s shoes, and Abby Ryder Fortson rounds out the group as Velma Dinkley.
It’s the first time all four have appeared together publicly in connection with the project, and the photo lands after months of staggered casting announcements. Mckenna was the first to sign on back in February, with her co-stars filtering in across the spring.
The role is a bit of a homecoming for her. She voiced a younger Daphne in the 2020 animated feature “Scoob!” and had been lined up to reprise the character in a holiday prequel, “Scoob! Holiday Haunt”, before Warner Bros. Discovery axed the film as part of a wave of cost cuts. When her casting was confirmed earlier this year, Mckenna celebrated on Instagram with a throwback photo of herself as a kid in a Daphne costume. “Oh my jeepers,” she wrote. “I can’t believe life is real I could cry all over again just looking at this announcement. So thankful, SO excited.”
Her co-stars bring their own credits. Hagen has appeared in “The Pitt” and “Dark Light”. Jenkins led Netflix’s own “Lost in Space” and more recently turned up in “The Bondsman”. Fortson earned warm reviews for her starring role in “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret”.
Ordered straight to series in a competitive bidding situation in March 2025, the eight-episode show is coming from Berlanti Productions, Midnight Radio, and Warner Bros. Television. Josh Appelbaum and Scott Rosenberg, the duo behind Netflix’s “Cowboy Bebop”, are writing and running the show. The characters remain the property of Hanna-Barbera, whose founders Greg Berlanti has spoken about with real affection. “One of my first and favorite jobs in Hollywood was sitting with Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera while they signed animation cells,” Berlanti said in an earlier statement.
Forget the Mystery Machine cruising up to a haunted amusement park. This version sends the gang to summer camp. According to the official logline, Shaggy and Daphne are longtime friends spending their final summer at camp when they get tangled in a mystery involving a lost Great Dane puppy that may have witnessed a supernatural killing. They team with Velma, the pragmatic local science brain, and Freddy, the strange new kid in town, to crack a case that starts pulling everyone’s secrets to the surface.
That’s a darker register than the Saturday-morning cartoon most viewers grew up on, and it tracks with Netflix’s pitch of a modern reimagining aimed at a young adult audience. The original “Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!” first aired in 1969 and has spawned dozens of animated follow-ups, but live-action takes have been rarer. The best known remain the 2002 “Scooby-Doo” film and its 2004 sequel “Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed”, both starring Freddie Prinze Jr., Sarah Michelle Gellar, Matthew Lillard, and Linda Cardellini. The two films pulled in more than $430 million combined.
Recent casting news has filled out the grown-up side of the ensemble. Paul Walter Hauser, the Emmy and Golden Globe winner most recently seen in “Black Bird” and “The Naked Gun”, has signed on as a series regular. The streamer has not yet confirmed his character.
Netflix has not set a premiere date for the series.
