Ariana Grande has exited 'American Horror Story: 13' after the shooting schedule collided with her tour

Ariana Grande at the AFI Awards Luncheon, Jan. 9, 2026. Monica Schipper/Getty Images, via Billboard.

The witches are back in New York, Jessica Lange is back, John Waters is somehow in this thing, and Ariana Grande is not.

Grande has exited American Horror Story: 13, the season she was announced for on Halloween 2025 and never got around to filming. Deadline broke it first and The Hollywood Reporter confirmed it: the show's shooting schedule shifted, the new dates ran straight into her Eternal Sunshine tour, and something had to give. It was the horror anthology. Per Billboard, she did not shoot a single scene.

What actually happened

The original plan was, apparently, the plan you'd expect from someone booked solid: film AHS around a stadium tour and let the calendar do its thing. Then production dates moved. Grande's tour dates did not, because tour dates famously do not move for television.

She has had her own scheduling turbulence lately. Billboard notes she rescheduled three shows in late June, pushing a July 12 Brooklyn date to July 14 and moving two Boston concerts from July 22 and 24 to July 23 and 26, citing production issues on her end. The tour wraps Aug. 23 in London. Season 13 started filming in April and premieres Sept. 24. You can see how that math never quite closed.

The cast she was supposed to join

This was a big one. Season 13 pulls the franchise's greatest hits back in, with several actors reprising their Coven roles:

• Sarah Paulson, Evan Peters, Angela Bassett, Kathy Bates
• Emma Roberts, Billie Lourd, Gabourey Sidibe, Leslie Grossman
• Jessica Lange, Frances Conroy, John Carroll Lynch, Mat Fraser, Mena Suvari
• Newcomers including John Waters, Cara Delevingne, Charlie Carver, Madeleine Petsch, Avantika and Alex Consani

TVLine reports Paulson, Roberts, Sidibe, Grossman and Conroy were photographed in full Coven regalia on the streets of New York on July 9. The Miss Robichaux's set has been rebuilt. Grande would have been the pop-star wild card in a room full of Murphy lifers.

She is not a stranger to that room, either. She played Chanel No. 2 on Ryan Murphy's Scream Queens in 2015 and live-tweeted her own on-screen murder, which remains one of the more committed pieces of promo in television history.

Nobody is mad about this

Worth saying clearly, because the internet will try: there is no feud here. Every outlet reporting this frames it as a calendar problem, not a fallout. No one has said otherwise on the record, and if the tour is the thing paying for the tour, the tour wins.

And Grande is not exactly idle. Petal, her eighth album, lands July 31, led by "Hate That I Made You Love Me," which gave her a 10th career Hot 100 No. 1. She's in Focker-In-Law this fall. The witches will manage.

American Horror Story: 13 premieres Thursday, Sept. 24 at 9 p.m. ET on FX and streams the next day on Hulu.