Chris Columbus has finished the script to Gremlins 3, the sequel to the beloved 80’s children’s horror film about how mistreating an adorable pet leads to a swarm of tiny evil lizards terrorizing a town. God, that sounds insane. Sure, Gremlins was a hit in the 80’s, but try pitching that concept to a studio today. “It’s like Furby meets The Evil Dead… for kids!”
Columbus talked to /Film about the script for the upcoming film, and had this to say:
“I’m really proud of the script,” Columbus said. “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.”
Gremlins is famously one of the PG-rated films that led the MPAA to create the PG-13 rating, along with Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. While parents at the time complained about Gremlins being too intense for children, nowadays studios want almost all of their films to be rated PG-13 to be more marketable.
Columbus wanted to assure fans that the new movie would keep the charm of the old, telling /Film the gremlins themselves would still be puppets with minimal CGI, instead of going full George Lucas and vomiting CGI all over every scene.
“Oh, without a doubt, minimal CGI,” Columbus said. “CGI will enable us to remove wires and make the puppeteers lives a little easier. It was brutal. It was like a marathon every night for those guys. In the bar scene alone there were 18 [or] 20 people behind the bar. No one had any space to move. It was just hellish for those guys so CGI will simplify that a little bit but it’s all puppets.”
I’m sure Gremlins 3 will be a fun throwback for fans of the original, but I’m growing a little tired of the endless sequels, spin-offs and reboots that Hollywood seems to be spitting out nowadays. It’s impossible to recapture the magic of Gremlins in a sequel, as anyone who has seen Gremlins 2: The New Batch will tell you. Why not just let these properties be what they are and move on to new projects? Do we really need to check in with the world of Gremlins over 30 years later? Were people clamoring for this, demanding more Gremlins films? Did we not learn our lesson from that awful Ghostbusters reboot last year?