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Joe Dante Talks The Upcoming GREMLINS Reboot Within!

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Back in 1984 the Horror comedy GREMLINS hit the scene. The film was released by Warner Bros, directed by Joe Dante, and executive produced by Steven Spielberg. It has a brilliant angle as the story follows a young man who receives a strange creature called a mogwai as a pet, which then spawns other creatures who transform into small, destructive, evil monsters. Then in 1990 Dante also directed the sequel, GREMLINS 2: THE NEW BATCH.

Now in the present day, a GREMLINS reboot continues to make waves as Warner Bros have Carl Ellsworth writing the new version. The original film was written by Christopher Columbus, who will be producing the new project along with Steven Spielberg.

Original director Joe Dante is not involved in the reboot, he has been preparing for his upcoming film BURYING THE EX which will arrive on July 19th. Dante recently spoke with AITH about the new GREMLINS project saying:

"It's not that I've washed my hands of it, it's that no one has asked me to be involved with it, they want to do it themselves. Fine, maybe this will be the time the rumors turn out to be true. Or not. As you know, this has been going on for years now, there's always a story that somebody has been asked to write or direct it, then something happens and they don't do it. I don't know if you have to take this with a grain of salt every time you hear about it. It's a complicated project, carved of the expectations of, how much is it going to be like the original? And the fact that the technology has completely changed; the first two movies were entirely dictated by the technology. The reason those movies are what they are is because of what we were able to do or not do. And now, you can do anything, anything you can imagine. The question is, why? Why do we want to make another one of these? And if we do, how is it going to be different from the first? If it's so different, the people who liked the originals aren't going to embrace it, you don't want to do that. But, on the other hand, the technology is really outdated now. Are they going to look the same, are they not going to look the same? Do they have the same properties? There's a lot of stuff attached to that franchise, and I think juggling it again is going to be a challenge."

Dante on the making of GREMLINS 2:

"When I was asked to do the sequel, which I originally turned down because it was so hard to make the first one... The only reason I decided to make the sequel was because years later they had tried to make a sequel and couldn't figure out how to do it, and they really wanted another one. So they said to me, "If you give us a couple of cans of film with gremlins in them next summer, you can do whatever you want." And they gave me three times the money we had to make the first one. So I made Gremlins 2, which was essentially about how there didn't need to be a sequel to Gremlins. [Laughs]"

Original synopsis:

"A boy inadvertently breaks 3 important rules concerning his new pet and unleashes a horde of malevolently mischievous monsters on a small town"

We will continue to bring you more on the GREMLINS reboot as it unfolds.