WB and Christopher Columbus Reportedly Planning New ‘Gremlins’ Movie

Can you believe it’s been 35 years since a Gremlins movie rampaged up on the big screen? That movie was of course Joe Dante’s bonkers 1990 sequel to the 1984 classic, with the franchise more recently returning to life with two seasons of an animated prequel series: “Gremlins: Secrets of the Mogwai” in 2022 and follow-up “Gremlins: The Wild Batch” last year.

But is the animated series setting the stage for a return of the Gremlins to live action? According to a new article from Deadline today that takes an expansive look at Warner Bros. Motion Picture Group’s near future plans, a new Gremlins movie may indeed be coming soon.

Deadline’s report details, “Franchise hopes abound down the road in Lord of the Rings The Hunt for Gollum, Practical Magic 2, DC’s Clayface and Supergirl, Drew Goddard’s incoming script for a new Matrix, a new Gremlins from Christopher Columbus and a Goonies treatment.”

Christopher Columbus was of course the writer of the original Steven Spielberg-produced Gremlins, so it’s very exciting to hear that Columbus is back on board with the franchise. It was Columbus who not only wrote the Joe Dante-directed horror classic but also conceived the idea in the first place, which garnered the interest of Spielberg. The rest is pop culture history.

Six years after the release of Gremlins, Joe Dante brought the franchise to New York City with Gremlins 2 : The New Batch in 1990, which Key & Peele hilariously (and lovingly) lampooned in one of the show’s all-time great sketches. I bring this up because it’s the perfect encapsulation of everything that’s so great about Gremlins 2, a go-for-broke sequel in every sense.

And yes, all of that is in the actual movie.

But back to the topic at hand! Talk of a third Gremlins movie has come and gone several times over the years, and you can read all about that lengthy history over on the franchise’s official Wikipedia page. But we had first heard about a new script written by Columbus back in 2017, with that iteration of the script described as being both “twisted” and “dark.”

“I’m really proud of the script,” Columbus said in 2017. “It is as twisted and dark as anything, so we’ll see. It’s always a budgetary conversation when we’re going to shoot it. I wanted to go back to the really twisted sensibility of the first movie. I found that was a very easy place for me to fall back into and start writing again so hopefully we’ll see that movie soon.”

Stay tuned for more on the future of the Gremlins saga.