Original “Gremlins” director Joe Dante has confirmed that he will be consulting on HBO Max’s upcoming animated prequel series “Gremlins: Secrets of the Mogwai”.
Set in 1920s Shanghai, the series will tell the story of how ten-year-old Sam Wing met the young Mogwai named Gizmo. Along with teenage street thief Elle, Sam and Gizmo take a journey through the Chinese countryside where they battle colorful monsters and spirits from Chinese folklore.
On the way they uncover a legendary treasure and are pursued by a power-hungry industrialist and his growing army of evil Gremlins. Speaking with the Daily Dead about the series, Dante says:
“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.”
Tze Chun (“Gotham”) pens and co-executive produces the ten-episode series while Darryl Frank and Justin Falvey executive produce for Warner Bros. Animation.
