Warner Bros. has delivered an early Christmas present to screenwriter Carl Ellsworth, a cute, fuzzy ball of potential profit participation deals that Ellsworth should protect from the water of anti-remake sentiment, lest enraged commenters spring from its back like mushrooms on a damp spring morning.
Anyway, belabored Gremlins metaphors aside, the rumored reboot of Joe Dante’s horror-comedy series that wreaks havoc on the internet every few years is now one step closer to reality, as Deadline reports that Ellsworth has been hired to script a “revamp” (the “hip” and “contemporary” are implied) of the 1984 box-office smash. Ellsworth, who got his start writing the supernatural costume-shop episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer and went on to script Wes Craven’s Red Eye and the Shia LaBeouf teen thriller Disturbia, has become something of a reboot expert in recent years, writing the recent remakes of Last House On The Left and Red Dawn as well as the upcoming Goosebumps movie. Considering this is the first in many potential rewrites, and that Hollywood commissions lots of scripts that never get made, it’s hard to say what this foretells for a new Gremlins. We wouldn’t be sad if the nasty little critters crawled inside Ellsworth’s laptop and erased the whole thing, though.