Actor Zach Galligan has said that a script for Gremlins 3 is ready – it just needs exec producer Steven Spielberg to read and approve it.
A third Gremlins film has been talked about for years, but there’s a possibility that it’s taken a step closer to being made. In an appearance at the UK’s Comic Con Manchester earlier this week, Zach Galligan – star of the first two films – told the crowd that a script has been written and is awaiting the approval of executive producer Steven Spielberg.
“After 35 years,” Galligan said in a clip shared on TikTok (via World Of Reel), “they’ve come up with a script. Warner Bros is incredibly interested in doing it. Apparently, it’s waiting upon Mr Spielberg to read it and approve it.”
Just before the clip cuts off, Gilligan appears to begin saying that the sudden movement on Gremlins 3 is thanks Beetlejuice Beetlejuice – Tim Burton’s belated sequel to his own 1988 comedy horror. That movie made more than four times its $100m budget back in cinemas alone, proving to Warner Bros that legacy sequels – particularly of the blackly comic variety – have an audience.
The Gremlins movies, directed by Joe Dante, are similarly filled with chaos and mischief. The 1984 original was a cheerfully anarchic Christmas movie in which the title creatures caused havoc in an all-American town. Behind the scenes, the practical creature effects were complex and challenging to realise, but the film’s $200m gross was so huge that a sequel became inevitable.
Read more: Gremlins 2 and its fourth wall-breaking genius
Dante eventually made Gremlins 2: The New Batch in 1990 – a fourth-wall breaking follow-up that parodied its own premise, a string of classic Hollywood films, and the entire notion of sequels. The idea being that the movie would short-circuit the whole franchise so that Dante wouldn’t be asked to make a third one.
The New Batch's low box office – it barely made back its own budget of around $40m – appeared to put paid to the idea of a Gremlins 3 in any case, but the continued affection for the series has meant that talk of a sequel has still bubbled to the surface now and again.
Chris Columbus, who wrote the script for the first movie, was said to have written a Gremlins 3 screenplay in 2017, but then things went rather quite. We don’t currently know whether the script Galligan referred to this week is by Columbus or another writer.
If that script passes muster with Spielberg, then Gremlins 3 could finally claw its way back into cinemas in the next couple of years or so.
