The idea of a third GREMLINS installment has been kicking around for awhile now. It’s been teased over and over again, but now it’s pretty much getting the final nail in the coffin from Joe Dante himself.
IGN spoke with Dante during an interview to cover THE HOLE 3D. Of course, the third GREMLINS got brought up and this is what he said, “There are no plans in the offing to do another Gremlins movie. I think that because of the CGI situation and the fact that you can now do anything when you make a movie… the original films were limited by the scope of what we could do technically, and that’s what the movies became about. Now it’s so wide-open, you can almost do anything, and I don’t think they’ve got a handle on what kind of movie it would be.”
Although I worshiped GREMLINS when I was younger, as was evidenced by the giant poster of Gizmo in the Barbie car on the back of my door– I get what he’s saying. I tend to forget that most of the movies I love so much were made better by the lack of technology at the time. People had to think of a way to Macgyver techniques they couldn’t currently pull off. Need an alien saucer? Get a pie pan!
Well, would Dante be up for it if some hypothetically got a “handle on it”? “I don’t think so. I think it’s probably time for me to let somebody new take a shot at it. I did Gremlins 2, which was my deconstruction of Gremlins, and I don’t want to do a deconstruction of both of them.”
This next part could either make you potentially happy or even more sad.
Dante wouldn’t mind if someone else helmed the film in his place. Really? “I don’t see why not. A lot of directors have sat back and watched people remake or re-imagine their films. We forget that a lot of the films that we like the most and are classics are actually remakes of films that are not as well-known.” He has a point here. However, sometimes the remake of a remake of a remake isn’t so good.