The question you might be asking yourself right now is ‘Leprechaun reboot? That’s a thing?’ Yes, gentle reader, that is indeed a thing and it now has a director in Spielberg discovery Zach Lipovsky.
You’ve probably not heard of Lipovsky either, but he appeared on the reality series On The Lot, in which aspiring filmmakers competed for a deal with DreamWorks. Does this mean that Spielberg has anything to do with the reboot? Nope. But it gives the guy a little bit of credibility.
Right. Lipovsky will direct the reboot of the 1993 classic (?) Leprechaun. The original starred Warwick Davis (who else?) as an evil little Irish caricature searching for his pot o’gold and … well, pretty much killing everyone in the process. The reboot will star WWE star Hornswoggle as the title character. It’s being produced, unsurprisingly, by WWE Studios and Lionsgate, so … yeah.
Lipovsky has been working fairly steadily since his stint on On The Lot, directing several TV movies and working as the visual effects supervisor on whole slew of shorts. He’s also developing a movie about the War of 1812 in the vein of 300. Beg pardon?
Really, this whole announcement is a massive WTF? moment for me. I’m not certain who decided that Leprechaun needed a reboot, but that was apparently an idea that captured the hearts of Liongate. Lipovsky has yet to gain a good feature film credit to his name, but there’s always time. Why do I doubt that Spielberg will want his name anywhere near this one?
If the Leprechaun reboot does well, can we expect the rest of the series to follow? Because I really want someone to remake Leprechaun In The Hood with Ice-T back in his original role. That just needs to happen.
The big question is whether or not Hornswoggle can step into the shoes and green jacket of Warwick Davis, who was actually all kinds of fun in the original Leprechaun films. We’ll just have to see if the luck of the Irish holds out.