Chris Columbus May Write And Produce A New Gremlins Movie
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This has been a summer full of sequels, reboots, remakes, and all manner of rehashes and revisitations, so you think we’d be used to it by now. Nothing should surprise us at this stage, but every time we hear the news that another one of our favorite titles being revamped it always makes us a little bit sad. The latest rumors revolve around a new incarnation of 1980s favorite Gremlins, which may be bringing back a familiar face from the franchise, original screenwriter Chris Columbus.
Columbus has had a wide and varied career, directing movies like Home Alone and two Harry Potter movies, as well as writing and producing countless others. In 1984 he penned the script for Gremlins, and now there is a rumor that he may revisit that family in both a writer and producer capacity.
What was originally reported as a remake of Joe Dante’s beloved little creature feature, is now being called a sequel of sorts. Despite that description, this sounds like a kind of soft reboot, set in the same world, but with new characters and stories. None of this is official, but a number of sources seem to be behind this bit of news.
Warner Bros. has been trying to get a new Gremlins movie off of the ground for years now. At the present time Seth Grahame-Smith (Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter) and David Katzenberg (The Hard Times of RJ Berger) are attached to produce, but this is another in a long line of movies that may or may not actually get made, so we’ll have to wait and see how this shakes out.
Remake, reboot, or sequel, the new Gremlins movie will still be about a boy who receives a strange pet, probably a mogwai or a mogwai called another name, as a Christmas present. As you would expect, he doesn’t follow the appropriate feeding and care guidelines—always listen to the wise old man—and kicks off an epidemic of gnarly little beasties running around, wrecking up the joint.
This isn’t the first time that Columbus has been linked to a new Gremlins feature, and though he has expressed interest, he has serious misgivings. One in particular is shared by the many fans who love the original, and that is, he doesn’t want to fall into the trap of overusing computer generated effects. He said:
I think it’s impossible to recreate in a CGI environment. I think it will inevitably lose some of its charm. Those are edgy Muppets in a sense and you don’t want to lose that sense of anarchy that those gremlins had, because behind the scenes are 25 puppeteers making them to come to life.
At the current time, this is all just speculation and unfounded rumor. Like we said, a new Gremlins has been in the works forever—original star Zach Galligan has said he wants in—and who knows if anything will come from this latest information or not.
