Max Landis pitched a found footage Gremlins to Joe Dante

Last Updated on August 2, 2021

Max Landis is currently writing and might direct a remake of his father John's horror comedy classic AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON, but before that project came along the VICTOR FRANKENSTEIN screenwriter was interested in rebooting another horror comedy classic from the '80s – GREMLINS, which was directed by his father's friend Joe Dante.

Some interesting GREMLINS information slipped through the cracks last year when Talkhouse posted a podcast conversation between Dante and Max Landis, during which Landis shares with the GREMLINS director the pitch he put together for a GREMLINS reboot. It works out that this didn't make the news at the time, since it doesn't appear to be happening, but in this podcast Landis revealed that Warner Bros. was once hoping to make the new GREMLINS a found footage movie.

Landis thought the idea of a found footage GREMLINS was bad at first, but then he figured out an approach to the idea that he really liked. The video below shows the moment during the recording of the podcast when Landis tells Dante exactly how his found footage GREMLINS would have worked. It would have been a sequel, with references to Landis's "favorite movie" GREMLINS 2 in there, the characters – and the gremlins – just would have been filming all of the action themselves.

A new GREMLINS film is still in development at Warner Bros., although the found footage idea has likely been dropped since the time when Landis made his pitch. Original GREMLINS screenwriter Chris Columbus recently finished writing a draft that he described as being "twisted and dark".