Brandy, Rita Ora reunite for new ‘Descendants’ movie, tease duet

July 16, 2026 | 12:03 PM

Brandy Norwood and Rita Ora attend the premiere of Disney Channel Original Movie ‘Descendants: Wicked Wonderland’ on July 14, 2026, in Los Angeles, California. (Amy Sussman/Getty Images)

Brandy and Rita Ora are returning to the world of Descendants.

The actresses reprise their roles as Cinderella and the Queen of Hearts in Descendants: Wicked Wonderland, the next chapter following the success of Descendants: The Rise of Red.

Speaking with ABC News entertainment contributor Kelley Carter in an interview aired on Good Morning America Thursday, the stars shared how the new film reimagines familiar Disney characters while bringing their own friendship to the screen.

Ora said she was drawn to the complexity of playing her role.

“I did love the idea of the Queen of Hearts, you never really know if she’s pretending or if it’s real,” Ora said. “You’ve got obviously Cinderella, who is always that anchor within the movies.”

Meanwhile, Brandy added, “I did have my villain pants on … that’s new for Cinderella.”

The pair also teased a new duet, which they said is one of the moments they’re most excited for fans to see.

“It was magical. The song is called ‘The Girl I Used to Be.’ I think people are gonna love it,” Brandy said.

Ora agreed, saying, “It was my dream to be not only on a song with her, but also just in anything with her because I’ve been looking up to her since I can remember.”

Their collaboration was years in the making.

“What people don’t really know is that I met Rita when she got her start,” Brandy said. “I saw this beautiful light in her then and I see it now. And when we got a chance to do this movie together, I mean, our chemistry was just unmatched.”

Descendants: Wicked Wonderland premieres Wednesday on Disney Channel and begins streaming Friday on Disney+.

Disney is the parent company of ABC News and Disney Channel.

Copyright © 2026, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

What an undergrad wants you to know about college parent Facebook groups

By CNN
August 19, 2026 | 8:10 AM

My daughter saw a mouse in her dorm room — what should she do? What brand of rain boots should I buy for my student? Should I hire a private service to wash my child’s clothes, or teach them to do their own laundry?When my older brother decided where to go to college four years ago, one of my mom’s friends sent her a link to something no one in my family had ever known existed: an admitted students Facebook page. Not for the students. For the parents.It was full of posts from stressed-out parents commiserating, ranting, and asking many specific and overbearing questions: What were the specs of a certain dorm room? How can I get access to my kid’s grades? Do I need to get my child to sign something to get access to his medical records?Facebook is now home to hundreds of groups specifically for parents of college students. Most of these groups are private and have thousands of members. To join, the volunteer administrators usually require proof of a student’s admission, like screenshots or scans of an admissions letter for a page administrator to review. These pages appear to be run by parents themselves, not the colleges, and passed down from parent administrator to parent administrator as students graduate.Should I know your child hasn’t made any friends?While many posts are about more practical matters, like what appliances are allowed and the need for mattress toppers, some parents are sharing detailed posts about a student’s lack of friends, mental health and other struggles — with thousands of strangers.There are also posts from parents expressing their deep grief and sorrow about their child leaving home, and their fear that they and their kid will not be able to handle this new stage of life.“Parents are … showing videos of themselves crying, where they drop off their kids. Like, they’re showing very skewed perspectives of extremes,” said Dr. Robyne Hanley-Dafoe, a Toronto area-based psychology and education behaviorist and author. “The vast majority of what we see anyway is the fact that like, yes, there’s big feelings and yes, there’s transitions, but it’s not nearly as extreme as what’s presented in social media.”It’s true the transition from high school to college can be a taxing and scary time for students and parents, as I experienced last fall. But I think the Facebook groups, while answering some questions, overdramatize the experience of sending a kid off to college. While a few of my mom’s friends said the groups could occasionally provide helpful information, they also said it created unnecessary stress about the big change.The scary transition to independenceYoung adults living away home, without a highly structured school day with classes and extracurriculars dominating most of their time, are going to make mistakes. How could they not, with new professors, classes, friends and social expectations? Things often don’t go according to plan. That’s when some parents post about those struggles, trying to help solve the problems themselves.When parents parachute in, they’re sending a message that their child can’t learn to fix problems themselves, according to Hanley-Dafoe. “It rocks the person’s confidence and their efficacy, which is their belief that they’re able to do things,” she said. This belief is vital for a student to do well in college and the rest of their life.I giggled when my mom read out a post about a kid losing his expensive coat at a party, and his worried father asking hundreds of other parents to ask their children to check their closets to see if they accidentally took it. Then I cringed a little, because that son is a real person who might not even know his father is spreading his dirty (or in this case, lost) laundry all over the internet.As my brother told me before I went to college, a little mystery can be a good thing. There is no mystery, or even basic privacy, when your worried parents are broadcasting your lost mittens or failed midterm exam to 5,000 people on a Facebook page. College students should not have to worry about their parents embarrassing them to an audience of thousands. And I should not know about another student’s personal struggles from their parent’s post.Why are these pages so popular with parents?The transition to college, especially freshman year, can be incredibly hard for students and parents. It was for me. By all measures everything went well, yet I was still painfully homesick for my entire first year. And there wasn’t much my parents could do, especially from hundreds of miles away. But they helped in little ways, like calling me, and I found ways to mitigate my struggles myself.“If you are kind of an obsessively involved parent, it scratches that itch for you,” said Dr. Lynn Lyons, a Concord, New Hampshire-based psychotherapist, of the Facebook parent groups. “And if you are not, and you venture into that world, you can be very easily convinced that you are not doing enough, that you should be monitoring your kid, that you should be decorating her dorm room.” Lyons is the author of “The Anxiety Audit: 7 Sneaky Ways Anxiety Takes Hold and How To Escape Them.”Parents need to shift from parenting up close to parenting from afar. Some parents are just not making the necessary change, according to experts.“We’re starting to see parents who have become extremely involved in the decision-making and the critical thinking for a lot of our young adults,” Hanley-Dafoe said. “Sometimes, we’ve done our students a wee bit of a disservice by not letting them figure things out on their own.”What should parents do to help?During my move-in day last fall, parents were unceremoniously separated from their kids at 3 p.m., when the new freshman class went to a ceremony on the football field and parents were told to leave campus. I came back to my half-set-up single room and finished unpacking myself. I had no plan and no roommate to go with me to events. A day later, I left on a backpacking trip for orientation. Even though it was superhard in the moment, I’m glad I was forced to just figure things out on my own.Many parents “have a really hard time tolerating their children’s distress, and so they don’t give their child the opportunity to tolerate their distress, right?” Lyons said. “But the ability to get through tough stuff on their own is a hugely important skill. The way that you know that you will be able to handle a tough transition is because you just got through one.”Now, that’s not to say parents can’t show up and give helpful advice. My mom visited several times, for parents’ weekend or for my choral concerts. It was comforting to have set dates when I knew that I’d get to see my mom, so that when my homesickness was at its worst, I could remind myself that it was only two weeks or so until I would see her again.I also called my parents for troubleshooting and advice. They were the ones to tell me that it was a good idea to make an appointment with my adviser to select classes, to go to office hours and to not worry about finding my best friends within the first week. A lot of problems I still handled on my own, and sometimes it really sucked. But I made it through, and now I know I can do it again. Other kids can, too, without their parents interfering on Facebook groups.The-CNN-Wire™ & © 2026 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.

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