Gremlins reboot update from producer Chris Columbus

Last Updated on August 2, 2021

As you’re well aware by now, a GREMLINS reboot is on the way, which you are powerless to stop. It’s always wise not to judge a movie (or anything, really), before you’ve seen it, but it’s difficult to feel any way about a revamped GREMLINS other than dubious at best. When people say, “They don’t make them like that anymore,” they could very well be talking about GREMLINS – and they’d be right.

In any event, perhaps one ray of light comes with the fact Chris Columbus – who wrote the original Joe Dante film – is on board as producer, as is Steven Spielberg. Speaking with Collider, Columbus sought to explain his vision of the upcoming franchise update:

 It is real. I am involved. When I finished Gremlins, and the first Gremlins was released, I was asked to write the sequel, and said there was no place else to go. Now this was before the pre-crazy-franchise-era of Hollywood where everything is a franchise. So obviously a long 30 years has passed, and I thought, “Okay, we can do this. We can actually find a way not to remake the first movie, but to take those characters and do something interesting.”
 

I realized, not from the Star Wars phase, but from J.J. [Abrams’] other movies, when he did Star Trek, he has a sense of taking that short of sense of nostalgia we all want and bringing it forward like he brought Leonard Nimoy into the first Star Trek. And that to me was why we connected to that and it was painfully obvious when we saw the Star Wars trailer recently that when you saw Han Solo and Chewbacca, we all had tears in our eyes, because we want that feeling again.

 
So I thought, okay, it’s cool. If we can pull it off—if we can create that feeling but deliver something new to the audience, then maybe we can do a really terrific Gremlins reboot.

Obviously, not much in the way of new info there, but Columbus is trying to amp up our expectations by bringing Abrams’ STAR TREK into it, which was both a successful movie on its own and a faithful follow-up to the original series and films. What he’s also talking about is that nostalgic feeling – that Amblin feeling – so many movies are trying to achieve nowadays without much luck. Perhaps GREMLINS can give us that, but until we find out for sure, we’re all still likely to remain dubious.