According to writer, director, and producer Chris Columbus, “Gremlins is actually in good shape, we’re doing Gremlins.” Columbus was out promoting the new Adam Sandler vehicle Pixels when a reporter from HitFix asked him about the new adventures of old Gizmo. That’s when Columbus stated that he wanted to take a page from the J.J. Abrams playbook:
When I saw Star Trek, you know, I was like, ‘this is the way you do it. You have to connect the audience emotionally to the past. By seeing Leonard Nimoy in that movie and then so obviously a few days ago seeing Harrison Ford and Chewbacca at the end of the Star Wars trailer. Eight million geeks crying their eyes out, me included. So I thought ‘well that’s a great, great thing to do.’ So we won’t…we’re going apply that to Gremlins. We’re not going to forget about the past.
It would appear that the new Gremlins isn’t going to be a hard reboot, but rather a new adventure that takes place in the established Gremlins universe. Columbus was coy in the interview about how he and his team were going to bring Mogwai into the new millennium, and there was no mention whether the producers of the new film would ignore the meta take on the Chinese goblins in Gremlins 2: The New Batch. (Perhaps this new script can explore the Mogwai’s origins as a highly intelligent and gentle alien race created by otherworldly inventor Mogturmen, as extrapolated in George Gipe’s Gremlins novelization.)
Presumably, this Gremlins reboot will be part of a cinematic universe that will include crossovers with Ghoulies, Hobgoblins, and Munchies, because cinematic universes are all the rage these days. Thankfully, marketing people won’t be able to make Gizmo any more extreme than he already was when he put on that Rambo headband and made a bow and arrow out of a paperclip and a rubber band.