Fanta didn't stumble into Halloween. It built toward it, one licensing deal at a time — and even in the year it announced it was done licensing, it quietly kept one licensed character in the lineup anyway. Here's the full three-year arc, cans and receipts included.
The whole thing kicked off as a single-movie tie-in with Warner Bros. for Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. Fanta redesigned its entire flavor lineup around the film's cast: Jenna Ortega on Orange, Winona Ryder on Strawberry, Catherine O'Hara on Pineapple, Monica Bellucci on Grape, and Willem Dafoe on Lemon. A new character, Bob the Shrinker, got his own can on Strawberry Kiwi.
The headliner was Michael Keaton's Beetlejuice himself, getting a brand-new limited-edition flavor with a can styled after his black-and-white striped suit. QR codes on the cans unlocked a shot at movie tickets. This was the test run — one franchise, one flavor line, prove the concept works.
Year two, Fanta stopped tying itself to a single movie and went franchise-agnostic. The partnership expanded to Universal Pictures and Blumhouse, pulling five horror icons from five separate properties onto cans at once: Chucky (Child's Play), Freddy Fazbear (Five Nights at Freddy's), The Grabber (The Black Phone), M3GAN, and Michael Myers (Halloween).
Chucky got the marquee treatment — his own flavor, "Chucky's Punch," the first nationwide Fanta fruit punch at retail in years, wrapped in a can printed with his Good Guy sweater pattern. The rest rode the existing flavor lineup: Freddy Fazbear took over Orange and Orange Zero Sugar, The Grabber took Strawberry, Michael Myers took Pineapple (U.S. exclusive), and M3GAN took Grape — but only through Freestyle machines in select cinemas and Universal theme parks, making her card the one nobody could just grab off a shelf.
Here's the part most U.S. collectors miss: the 2025 set you saw on American shelves isn't the same set that shipped internationally. Fanta's UK and CCEP-market rollout — branded "Fanta's Fearsome Foursome" — dropped Michael Myers entirely and reassigned the other four characters to completely different flavors:
| Character | US Version | UK / International |
|---|---|---|
| Chucky | Fruit Punch ("Chucky's Punch") | Forest Berries Zero Sugar |
| Freddy Fazbear | Orange + Orange Zero | Orange Zero Sugar only |
| The Grabber | Strawberry | Fruit Twist + Fruit Twist Zero |
| M3GAN | Grape — Freestyle machines only | Lemon — full retail release |
| Michael Myers | Pineapple (US exclusive) | Not included |
Two things jump out. First, M3GAN is a genuine retail can in the UK — a full, buyable six-pack — while in the U.S. she was locked behind Freestyle machines in select cinemas and theme parks. If you're chasing a complete M3GAN can and you're only searching U.S. sellers, you're making it harder on yourself than it needs to be. Second, Fanta didn't just swap labels — it swapped actual flavors. Chucky is a punch in America and a zero-sugar berry drink in Britain. Same character, same doll, completely different can in your hand.
This isn't new for Fanta. The brand has run over 90 different flavors globally for decades, and the differences go deeper than Halloween marketing — American Fanta Orange uses high-fructose corn syrup, Yellow 6, and Red 40 with no real juice, while UK and Italian Fanta Orange are made with actual orange juice concentrate and no synthetic dyes at all, a gap that's only gotten more relevant given the whole industry's dye-removal push. For a set-completionist, that means "collecting every Fanta Horror can" was never really a single, one-country hobby to begin with.
Same doll, same year, two completely different drinks — and only one of them is a punch.
Worth flagging for anyone collecting Fanta cans rather than Halloween cans specifically: the Haunted Universe isn't the only licensed character set Fanta is running. There's a parallel Xbox 25th anniversary series built around four Microsoft franchises, and it uses exactly the same playbook — one character per flavor, art filling the can, region-specific sizes and flavor names.
From the cans themselves: Call of Duty takes Orange (and a Zero Sugar version), Halo runs on Pineapple in one market and Raspberry in another, Forza Horizon gets Grape with a Toyota truck across the front, and Diablo gets the darkest of the set — Crimson Sour Cherry in a 12oz US can, and a Dark Cherry 330ml can abroad. Same split-by-country pattern as the horror sets, right down to the flavor names changing across the Atlantic. [CHECK: release date, retailers, and prices before this goes live.]
Fanta's Haunted Universe — official introductory trailer
Here's where the original version of this post got it wrong, and it's worth walking through why. Coca-Cola's own press release, dated August 24 with a full campaign launch on August 26, 2026, framed this year as Fanta going "from collaborator to creator" — four original characters, no licensed IP, Fanta owns the whole thing outright. That's the headline. It's not the whole picture.
Independent retail trade coverage out of the UK (Coca-Cola Europacific Partners' own trade announcements) confirms the four original characters do have real names now: Haystacks (a jack-o'-lantern-headed scarecrow, on Fanta Lemon), Drayk (a vampire, on Fruit Twist and Fruit Twist Zero Sugar), Howlie (a werewolf, on Fanta Grape), and Franx (a cyborg Frankenstein type, on Fanta Mango). In Great Britain, this whole push is actually branded "Horrorverse," not "Haunted Universe" — same characters, same season, different name depending which Coca-Cola division is talking about it.
But here's the part Coca-Cola's global press release left out entirely: Ghost Face, from the Scream franchise, is riding alongside the four originals. In the UK, he sits on Fanta Orange and Orange Zero Sugar — the single biggest-selling Fanta variant. In the US, he gets his own dedicated flavor instead: Ghost Face Punch, a purple-pouring berry punch in a solid black can with the white Ghost Face mask across the front, already turning up at retailers like Target and H-E-B. Nobody involved has said who licensed the mask (it's owned by costume company Fun World, separate from the Scream film rights), but the fact remains: 2026 isn't a clean break from licensed horror IP at all. It's four owned characters plus one very recognizable rented one — just riding a different can depending which country you're in.
And the US assignment for the four originals doesn't match the UK's either. Per candyhunting's Instagram tracking and Haunted Attraction Network's reporting, the US versions skip Fruit Twist, Grape, and Mango entirely (all rare in US Fanta lineups to begin with) and instead put the scarecrow on Orange, the vampire on Pineapple, and the werewolf on Strawberry — Fanta's actual U.S. core flavors. The Frankenstein-type character (Franx, per the UK naming) hasn't been spotted on a US can yet as of this writing.
Note the pattern holding from every prior year: the US and international sets are never actually the same set. Even in the year Fanta announced a unified "50 global markets" rollout, the character-to-flavor pairings still split by region.
Three years in, the pattern isn't "borrow, then stop borrowing." It's "borrow, borrow more, then quietly keep borrowing while announcing you've stopped." Whether Fanta actually owns its Halloween aisle by 2027 depends on one simple thing worth watching: what's on the Orange can next year. If it's still a licensed character, the "Haunted Universe" is a marketing layer on top of the same old strategy. If it's Haystacks, Drayk, Howlie, or Franx, Fanta actually pulled off the pivot it announced this week.