Best known these days for directing Home Alone and the first two Harry Potter movies, Chris Columbus was also the screenwriter behind two enduring ’80s classics: Gremlins and The Goonies, both of which were released by Warner Bros. and executive produced by Steven Spielberg. Now, according to a new report on Deadline, Warner Bros. is developing new Gremlins and The Goonies films, with Columbus attached to at least one of those projects.
Deadline wrote that, at Warner Bros., “Franchise hopes abound down the road in Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum, Practical Magic 2, DC’s Clayface and Supergirl, Drew Goddard’s incoming script for a new Matrix, a new Gremlins from Christopher Columbus and a Goonies treatment.”
Directed by Joe Dante from Columbus’s script, Gremlins had the following synopsis: A gadget salesman is looking for a special gift for his son and finds one at a store in Chinatown. The shopkeeper is reluctant to sell him the `mogwai’ but his grandson sells it to him with the warning to never expose him to bright light, water, or to feed him after midnight. All of this happens and the result is a gang of gremlins that decide to tear up the town on Christmas Eve. Released in 1984, Gremlins spawned a 1990 sequel called Gremlins 2: The New Batch… and the insanity of that one managed to bring the series to an end for a while. Several years ago, Columbus worked with Disturbia writer Carl Ellsworth on a Gremlins 3 script, but the film didn’t make it into production. Instead, focus shifted over to an animated prequel series that can be found on the Max streaming service. Now, it sounds like Warner Bros. is interested in making another Gremlins movie again.
The Goonies came along in ’85, scripted by Columbus and directed by Richard Donner. The synopsis: Old-fashioned yarn about a band of adventurous kids who take on the might of a property developing company which plans to destroy their home to build a country club. When the children discover an old pirate map in the attic, they follow it into an underground cavern in search of lost treasure but come up against plenty of dangerous obstacles along the way. There have been rumblings of a Goonies follow-up for decades, but the project never went anywhere and it seemed to have been shelved permanently when Donner passed away in 2021. Apparently, that’s not the case.
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