Chris Columbus Says 'Gremlins' And 'Goonies' Reboots Are A Slow Process

Chris Columbus wrote both Gremlins and Goonies before he segued into directing, and he is involved in reboots of both those films. Both, particularly Gremlins, have been the object of a great deal of talk for several years, with (thankfully) no concrete results to show for the development efforts.

With the new Columbus film, Pixels, hitting theaters this coming week, the director is out on the press circuit saying that both '80s reboots are fill in full swing, at least on the development side. The good news is that the process is a very slow one, so we probably don't have to worry about either film arriving for a while yet.

Columbus gave ScreenCrush the "never say die" update, saying,

The stuff that I'm involved with — the Gremlins and Goonies reboots, for instance — they would do that without me. So, I'm staying involved just so I can be protective and actually protect what people love about those movies so it doesn't go off track.

But he also says that developing the films "[is] a slow process and I don't think it will happen too quickly."

This, you might note, is the first time in a while there has real public talk of a Goonies reboot, using that specific term. We've heard a lot about a potential sequel, and we've heard that it isn't close to happening. Producer Frank Marshall recently acknowledged that a film was brewing, and that it won't be a sequel:

You don't want to disappoint the fans by just doing a schlocky movie.  You want to do a real legitimate movie.  It's not going to be a sequel. In the Amblin spirit of Goonies, that's what has to be.

The Gremlins reboot, however, has had a new writer hire in the past few months. And Columbus has talked about it more recently, with the director saying,

And then suddenly all these years later, we were approached with an idea that really sounded like an interesting version. It's not a remake of the movie at all. It's a, it's just a reinvention of it.

The question is: how will the box-office fortune of Pixels affect these reboots? If Pixels is a hit, especially abroad, we might see other Columbus projects gain a bit of momentum, in which case either the Gremlins or Goonies reboots, or both, might pick up steam. (A related question is: how will the quality of Pixels affect your level of anxiety over these potential remakes? The answers to these two questions could amplify one another, but we'll wait and see.)