How Warner Bros. Bribed Gremlins Director Joe Dante To Create A Sequel

The summer movie season of 1984 was built around three guaranteed hits. Steven Spielberg's "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom" held pole position as a Memorial Day release, and was expected to dominate through to Labor Day. "Ghostbusters," with its irresistible trio of Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, and Harold Ramis, seemed poised to be a hybrid horror-comedy smash. And "Star Trek III: The Search for Spock" felt like a brand-expanding opportunity for Gene Roddenberry's franchise.

No one knew what to make of "Gremlins." I don't remember seeing a single trailer for the film prior to its release, nor do I think much was revealed in the genre magazine pages of Starlog and Fangoria. All I had to go on was John Alvin's poster, which featured two furry hands poking out from a cracked-open shoebox. The tagline read "Cute. Clever. Mischievous. Intelligent. Dangerous." But Steven Spielberg's name on the one-sheet, two years after he'd produced the gleefully terrifying "Poltergeist," made it a must-see for movie-mad kids all over the country.

I wound up loving "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom" and "Ghostbusters," but "Gremlins" was the film I kept going back to see. Joe Dante's Looney Tunes-infused horror romp was gory, goofy, and gloriously anarchic. I got off on its irreverent energy, and read everything I could about the making of this brilliantly mad film. "Gremlins" stunned Hollywood by becoming the year's fourth highest-grossing movie, but I never found myself clamoring for a sequel, which was fortunate because Dante didn't want to make one. WB, however, desperately desired a second go-round with Gizmo and the gang, and when Dante kept turning them down, they gave him complete creative control. This got Dante's attention.

In Consequence's 2020 oral history on the making of "Gremlins 2: The New Batch," Dante and producer Mike Finnell acknowledged that they did try to make WB happy by coming up with a worthy sequel idea. According to Finnell, "Almost immediately after the first one, Warner Brothers wanted to do a sequel. And Joe and I worked with a series of writers trying to come up with something, and nothing clicked. And this went on for a while, and we finally just kind of gave up. Just nothing was working."

Dante found a "Gremlins" sequel unappealing because he'd found the production of the first movie "harrowing." As the director told Consequence, "We had to make up the technology as we were going along, we didn't get much support from the studio, and it wasn't a very big budget. And it was exhausting, frankly. So, as gratified as I was when it was successful, I really couldn't chase the idea of spending another half a year or a year with puppets. I just didn't have it in me. So I said, 'Thanks but no thanks.'"

WB was undeterred. They threw money at a variety of writers in the hope that something would stick. It never did. That's when WB made Dante an offer no filmmaker could refuse.

Finnell told Consequence that development on a "Gremlins" sequel had gone dead for two years when Dante left their WB office to hit up the commissary and ran across studio chief Terry Semel. Per Finnell, "Terry said, 'Look, we need "Gremlins 2". We have to have "Gremlins 2." You could do anything you want. I don't care about the script. I don't care about the story. It just has to be called "Gremlins 2" and have Gremlins in it. Anything else is your call.'"

"That's not an offer that you very often get," said Dante. "I've certainly never had it before or since. And enough time had passed that the technology had improved. So, the possibilities were expanded from what was possible to do with the first film — and so Mike Finnell and I agreed to go ahead and develop a sequel."

Carte blanche for Dante meant hiring the greatest creature creator in Hollywood, Rick Baker, to go bananas on the crafting of new Gremlins. If you've seen "Gremlins 2: The New Batch," you know Baker came through with a vengeance. Though the film was a box office disappointment (WB erred in opening it against "Dick Tracy" in the summer of 1990), it's become a cult favorite and is considered by many fans to be superior to the first movie. I think they're such different movies that it's impossible to choose a favorite. I'm so glad the chaotic "Gremlins 2: The New Batch" exists, and I dread the forthcoming, Dante-less "Gremlins 3" from Chris Columbus and Steven Spielberg. Yes, Columbus wrote the script for the first movie, but everything we love about it came from the restlessly inventive mind of Dante. It's like hiring Sean Levy to make "The Godfather: Part IV."