With the entire eighties serving as a ripe platter for studios to reboot beloved classics, its no surprise that Gremlins has been touted as one such property. For years now an attempted reboot to the deranged mini-monster series has been in development. In fact, back in July, original screenwriter Chris Columbus was rumoured to be producing the alleged remake – but nothing has since been confirmed.
Today, The Playlist revealed in an interview with original director Joe Dante that the man behind the puppets isn’t coming out to play again:
“I am not involved with it. It’s something that we hear about every six months for the past five to ten years. I know there have been many attempts to do it. It’s tricky because the rights are jointly owned by Warner Bros and Steven Spielberg’s Amblin, so you’ve got to jump through two hurdles to get your idea approved.”
When prompted for his thoughts on the numerous attempts at kickstarting the series, he said:
“I know a lot of very well known people have come up with ideas for another ‘Gremlins’ movie and not of them have gone. I do know, however, that there’s a script being written now and the tricky thing is that I’m not sure that the people making the movie now understand what the original appeal was of the first movie, which was not beloved by the studio until it started making money.”
The most intriguing reveal in the interview concerns his role in the follow up, Gremlins 2: The New Batch. It seems that the studio had begun work on the sequel, until they realised – how the heck do we recreate the magic of the first?
“When they started making a sequel, they didn’t understand what we had done on the original to make it successful. So they hired me to come back and make the sequel. Because nobody understood it. So it will be very interesting to see what they come up with.”
Last year Warner Bros., who hold half of the rights, brought Seth Grahame-Smith and David Katzenberg (the writing duo behind Beetlejuice 2) on board to produce. This had been the first official confirmation that the Gremlins were on track to make another silver screen appearance. Since then, talk has died down and we can only presume…. they’re writing a script? Messing about with puppets? Who knows? We’ll get excited when a director is announced and a few solid casting decisions are made.
Until then, all we know is: Dante is out.