IGN recently spoke with my new Twitter BFF Joe Dante to talk about his new film The Hole and managed to sneak in a few questions about the man’s most famous series.
The surprising news? Dante wouldn’t want to do a Gremlins 3. When asked if he would be involved, he replied: “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.”
The man has a point. If you haven’t seen it in a while, Gremlins 2 has aged beautifully. It’s a perfect satire of the first film and the genre in general, and holds up much stronger than the original film… probably because it utterly eviscerates it, making fun of every single flaw far better than anyone else could have. Lincoln’s birthday, anyone?
Of course, this is all moot, as there aren’t any immediate plans to make Gremlins 3 anyway.
“There are no plans in the offing to do another Gremlins movie” he revealed. “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.”
It is a stumper. Do you try to remake the original and do it scary again, or do another spoof? How can you plan to top either, especially using CGI, if that’s the case? Who would be the man to carry the torch this time?
Sadly, this might be the closest we get to a new Gremlins film in a long time.