Put the cap on your water bottle and satiate your appetite before midnight, because a certain mogwai might soon be back in our lives. A new report says Warner Bros. is developing Gremlins 3 with the original film’s writer Christopher Columbus. That’s not the end of the studio’s plans to appeal to ’80s nostalgia, though. Warner Bros. is also said to be waiting on a treatment for a The Goonies sequel.
In a lengthy piece at Deadline about Warner’s new movie strategy, Anthony D’Alessandro slipped in a small nugget full of big possibilities. Here’s what he wrote:
Franchise hopes abound down the road in Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum, Practical Magic 2, DC’s Clayface and Supergirl, Drew Goddard’s incoming script for a new Matrix, a new Gremlins from Christopher Columbus and a Goonies treatment.
A new Gremlins. From Christopher Columbus? The person who wrote the beloved 1984 film. Oh, is that all?
Obviously not, because right after that enormous bit of news is the tidbit that Warner Bros. is also in the early stages of finally making a long-discussed Goonies sequel. That one seems much further away than this reported Gremlins 3 project, but IP is King and nostalgia sells. If that treatment is everything the studio hopes it will be, a Goonies 2 will become a lot more likely.
Gremlins 3 has long been a topic of speculation, too. (And not just because of Nick Lutsko’s unsanctioned masterpiece.) Gremlins: The New Batch came out in 1990, and after decades of waiting for a third film, it seemed like we might be on the verge of getting one in 2017. That’s when Columbus revealed he’d already written a script, which he called “twisted and dark.” Is that the same screenplay Warner Bros. is preparing to make? Or did he revise or even start anew on one?
We don’t know yet. But we do know we’ll start making sure not to leave any random cups of water out. We’ve waited a long time for Gremlins 3, but we still remember the rules.