At the tail end of Disney’s massive, live-action presentation on Saturday, Star Wars director J.J. Abrams brought out Oscar-winning actress Lupita Nyong’o by referring to her as “apparently someone who is legally required to be in every Disney movie.” The joke landed solidly with the audience at Disney’s D23 Expo because over the course of the two-hour presentation, Nyong’o appeared on stage three times to promote first The Jungle Book, then The Queen of Katwe, and, finally, Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Lupita Nyong’o, it seems, is the new face of Disney, and she’s emblematic of the incredibly appealing direction the old-fashioned House of Mouse is taking.

The title of the panel, “Worlds, Galaxies, and Universes: Live Action at The Walt Disney Studios” couldn’t be more accurate. With live-action heavy hitters like Lucasfilm and Marvel Studios in their stable, Disney does seem primed to take over the world, the galaxy, etc. But what Disney made clear in their ambitious presentation is that their slate of films is quite global minded. Disney’s biggest heavy hitter (well, until Star Wars opens in December, anyway) is Marvel, and the comic-book studio continues to get flak for its lack of diversity. When introducing Marvel’s portion of the presentation, Disney Studios chairman Alan Horn joked, “Everyone’s big. Everyone’s good looking. Everyone’s named Chris.” And, indeed, a good-looking Chris or two (Evans and Pine) did make an appearance on the D23 stage. But it’s clear that the square-jawed, all-American heroes of the typed played by Chris Evans in Captain America: Civil War and Chris Pine in the based-on-a-greatest-generation-true-story throwback The Finest Hours aren’t the only ones Disney is relying on to take their legacy into the next century.

Increasingly, the palette at Disney is looking a lot more varied. Building on upcoming multi-cultural animated projects like the Polynesian Moana starring the Rock and the Día de Los Muertos–themed Coco, Disney unveiled a refreshingly diverse live-action slate. Of all the footage screened during the presentation, the biggest hit was Jon Favreau’s Jungle Book. (Not to be confused with Andy Serkis’s Jungle Book: Origins.) It might seem strange to look for authentic diversity in a tale from “White Man’s Burden” author Rudyard Kipling featuring the voice talents of Bill Murray (as Baloo), Scarlett Johansson (as Kaa), and Christopher Walken (as King Louie), but Favreau was insistent that the star and lynchpin of his motion-capture production was newcomer Neel Sethi as Mowgli. Sethi, who took the stage with fellow co-stars Nyong’o and Ben Kingsley, was given the floor perhaps more often than his 11-year-old self could quite manage. But the convention audience ate up his unbridled enthusiasm with a spoon.

Meanwhile Lucasfilm, which faced some initial backlash after unveiling the first cast photo for Star Wars: The Force Awakens, debuted a very consciously international cast for their upcoming spin-off Rogue One. Hong Kong action star Donnie Yen, Chinese triple-threat Jiang Wen, Oscar winner Forest Whitaker, Danish dynamo Mads Mikkelsen, intense Australian Ben Mendelsohn, Mexican cutie Diego Luna, and British rising star Riz Ahmed, all join leading lady Felicity Jones. The only white American guy announced, Alan Tudyk, will provide his voice only to a “performance capture” role that has yet to be announced. If we wanted to lodge one complaint, it would be that the “one” in Rogue One seems to stand for “only one woman in this great cast.” But when that woman wears her blaster slung low on her hip like Han Solo, it’s hard to be disappointed.