Shooting Fish #1 - Gremlins 3 (Part 1)

Whether we like it or not, beloved movies from the 80s are going to be pillaged for illconceived sequels and reboots for the forseeable future. Always seen as an easy way to make cash and get the fans on side. Like shooting fish in a barrel!

But things are never that simple.

Shooting Fish #1: Gremlins 3

Part 1. The Background.

Gremlins should have been a throwaway film. A forgettable piece of B-Movie genre cinema from an age when the screens were full of such movies.

But much like the Gremlins themselves, who morphed into every movie stereotype the producers could think of during the famous scene at Dorry’s Tavern, the movie refused to be just one thing. It was a creature feature, a horror, a christmas film, a satirical comedy and a deliciously dark kid’s movie from the decade that defined what a kid’s movie could be and decided it didn’t have to be just Disney.

And to people of a certain age, (ahem…. hi) it’s more than that. A cultural phenomenon with dialogue and lore still quoted to this day. Hated by critics at the time, but raised way beyond the level of “just a film” by the army of excitable 8-year-olds like me that took it to their hearts, it succeeded as much because of its limitations as despite them. It became “ours”. Parents enjoyed E.T. with their kids and thought Back to the Future was a wonderful piece of family cinema. But they thought Gremlins was stupid. And they were right… it was just OUR kind of stupid. And it was pretty clever for a stupid film.

The Academy Awards voted Terms of Endearment the best film in 1984, and as great as that film is, ask yourself how often you’ve quoted it since? Because I know you’ve quoted Gremlins.

Having got it so wrong in 1984, the industry that dismissed Gremlins decided to jump on board for Gremlins 2 and revel in some of that lovely praise (in the form of cash, I’m sure they hoped). But just as an expectant movie industry belatedly jumped onto the Gremlins bandwagon, director Joe Dante jumped off. Initially uninterested in making a sequel, thinking the original did everything it set out to, Dante finally relented after Warners Bros. tripled the film’s budget and gave him 100% artistic control over the final film, something almost unheard of at the time for a big studio production.

So, Joe took this unexpected bounty and created an anti-corporate, anti-movie, anti-sequel and even anti-Gremlins movie. It broke a ridiculous amount of film making conventions, took the piss out of itself and everyone else, and forced people to use the word “zany” for the first time since the 1950s.

Not at all what Warners envisaged, Gremlins 2 may have been exactly the film Dante wanted to make, but it essentially killed off the chances of any future films. Indeed, that may have been exactly what he intended.

So while the Gremlins continued wreaking havoc across other media, with an excellent animation “The Secrets of the Mogwai” currently ongoing, as well as comics, novelisations, TV adverts and video games, it seemed Joe Dante’s “zany” sequel ended the big screen adventures of Gizmo and Co.

Yet more than 4 decades after the original disaster in Kingston Falls, the prospect of a third film remained, quietly resting inside an ornate wooden box (perhaps). The main reason it didn’t happen sooner was no one could agree how to continue the franchise. How do you write a script for a sequel when the film immediately before it pulled to shreds that very idea?

Plot, tone and even reboot versus continuation, all had to be finalised and nailed down tight and, despite the powerhouse names involved (Dante, Spielberg, Columbus) along with dozens of experienced writers, no one could see a way forward.

Until now…

UP NEXT. Part 2: Gremlins 3, the pitfalls