GREMLINS Director Joe Dante Discusses the New Prequel Series GREMLINS: SECRETS OF THE MOGWAI
HBO Max is producing an animated Gremlins prequel series titled Gremlins: Secrets of the Mogwai. The series will consist of 10 episodes, and it’s being developed by Once Upon a Time and Gotham writer Tze Chun. This is the previously released synopsis:
Set in 1920s Shanghai, the series 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.
The director of the original film, Joe Dante, is also helping develop the new project as a consultant, and in a recent interview with Daily Dead, he talked about the series and how happy he is with how it’s coming along:
“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.”
Gremlins was one of my favorite films as a kid and I still enjoy watching it during the holidays. I love the concept of this series, and I’m looking forward to seeing how the story plays out. It sounds like it’s gong to be a ton of fun!