Mckenna Grace is standing in for a Great Dane that hasn’t been rendered yet. Netflix released the first official image from “Scooby-Doo: Origins” Friday, and the shot introduces the live-action Mystery Inc. gang without the mystery pooch himself, who’ll be added in later by a VFX team. Grace, cast as Daphne Blake, is flanked by Tanner Hagen as Shaggy, Abby Ryder Fortson as Velma and Maxwell Jenkins as Fred. Cameras are rolling in Atlanta.
For Grace, this is a return trip. She voiced a young Daphne in the 2020 animated feature “Scoob!”, and she was set to reprise the role in the prequel “Scoob! Holiday Haunt” before Warner Bros. Discovery scrapped that project as a tax write-off. A Halloween costume in 2024, which fans read at the time as a possible tease, preceded the Variety scoop in February that confirmed her casting. She’s 19. This is already her second crack at the character.
The Texas-born actress has spent most of the past decade playing the younger version of someone famous. She was young Tonya Harding in “I, Tonya”, young Carol Danvers in “Captain Marvel”, and young Sabrina Spellman in Netflix’s “Chilling Adventures of Sabrina”. The through-line broke when “Ghostbusters: Afterlife” handed her the lead as Phoebe Spengler, a role she reprised in “Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire”. She’s also turned up in “Annabelle Comes Home”, “Five Nights at Freddy’s 2” and “The Haunting of Hill House”. “The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping” and “Scream 7” are next on her slate.
The series itself is billed as a modern reimagining, with showrunners Josh Appelbaum and Scott Rosenberg rewinding the clock to the case that started it all. The eight-episode logline describes a final summer at camp, a lost Great Dane puppy, and a supernatural murder the pup may have witnessed. Velma arrives as a scientific townie. Fred is the handsome new kid. The whole thing is angled younger and spookier than the Raja Gosnell films from 2002 and 2004.
Frank Welker, who’s voiced Fred since 1969 and took over Scooby in the 2002 live-action movie, is back to voice the dog. Paul Walter Hauser plays Scooby’s owner. Toby Haynes, whose credits include “Black Mirror” and “Andor”, directs the premiere and executive produces alongside Greg Berlanti, Sarah Schechter and Leigh London Redman of Berlanti Productions, plus Appelbaum, Rosenberg, André Nemec, Jeff Pinkner and Adrienne Erickson for Midnight Radio. Warner Bros. Television produces.
The casting skews closer to the source material than the early-2000s movies did. Freddie Prinze Jr., Sarah Michelle Gellar, Matthew Lillard and Linda Cardellini were all in their mid-twenties to early thirties when they suited up. Grace, Hagen, Fortson and Jenkins are all teenagers, closer to the 14-to-17 range Netflix reportedly pursued during the casting process. The cast posted photobooth pictures together on social media last weekend ahead of the shoot.
No premiere date has been set. Production is scheduled to run in Atlanta through September, which pushes the likely release into 2027. Episode one carries a straightforward script title: “Scooby-Doo.”
Jinkies!! The scooby gang has started production on SCOOBY-DOO: ORIGINS!
— Netflix (@netflix) April 24, 2026
• Mckenna Grace as Daphne
• Tanner Hagen as Shaggy
• Abby Ryder Fortson as Velma
• Maxwell Jenkins as Fred pic.twitter.com/jwpaGLKUUU
