During an interview with Daily Dead, Joe Dante, the director of Gremlins and Gremlins 2: The New Batch, revealed that he will be consulting on HBO Max’s upcoming animated Gremlins prequel series Gremlins: Secrets of the Mogwai.
Regarding the project, Dante said: “Yeah, I’m consulting on it. It’s good. It’s going to be good, yeah. I’m very pleased with the way it’s going. It’s a prequel. It goes back to the character Mr. Wing when he was a boy, and when he first discovered the Mogwai. It’s set in China in the ’20s, and it’s animated and it’s very big in the sense that if you tried to shoot it as a theatrical film, it would be outrageously expensive. But in animation, you kind of get away with almost anything you can think of. And it’s probably not going to be done until 2021 or maybe the end of 2020. It’s for HBO Max, a new streaming variant of HBO. I think this is a really clever way to get back into that. I think that they found it pretty difficult to make a sequel to Gremlins 2, because of just the way I made it. And they just could never really quite figure out how to do it. So I think this is a great way to sort of get the franchise back on people’s minds.”
RELATED: Streamers in Bidding War Over Krysten Ritter’s New Dark Comedy Series
Set in 1920s Shanghai, Gremlins: Secrets of the Mogwai will tell the story of how 10-year-old Sam Wing (future shop owner Mr. Wing in the 1984 movie) met the young Mogwai called Gizmo. Along with a teenage street thief named Elle, Sam and Gizmo take a perilous journey through the Chinese countryside, encountering, and sometimes battling, colorful monsters and spirits from Chinese folklore. On their quest to return Gizmo to his family and uncover a legendary treasure, they are pursued by a power-hungry industrialist and his growing army of evil Gremlins.
Tze Chun (Children of Invention, Gotham) will write and co-executive produce the 10-episode series. Gremlins first took the box office by storm in director Joe Dante’s 1984 Christmas/horror/comedy. In 1990, Dante returned for Gremlins 2: The New Batch, which had a much lighter tongue-in-cheek tone than the first film.
RELATED: Friends Reunion is a Go at HBO Max!
Darryl Frank and Justin Falvey will executive producer for Amblin Television along with Sam Register. Brendan Hay will serve as co-executive producer with Dan Krall serving as supervising producer. The series is produced by Amblin in association with Warner Bros. Animation.
The series is expected to launch on HBO Max in 2021.
(Photo by Warner Bros. Pictures/Amblin E/Sunset Boulevard/Corbis via Getty Images)
