Warner Bros. Execs Robbed Gremlins 2 Audiences Of This Hilarious Interactive Experience

To state the obvious right up front: cult cinema legend Joe Dante's 1990 monster comedy "Gremlins 2: The New Batch" is one of the best movies ever made. On a mere slapstick level, "Gremlins 2" is already sublime, and one can stand in awe of its technical prowess as well; it contains some of the best practical monster effects in cinema history. More than that, though, "Gremlins 2" is a deconstruction of cinema itself, a film about the agents of chaos that can reach into the very art of filmmaking itself. The term "gremlins" was popularized during World War II as a colloquial way to explain inexplicable technical problems in airplanes. If an engine was broken, a gremlin snuck inside and broke it.

For "Gremlins 2," Dante imagined the machinery sabotaging WWII imps as invaders of cinema. What if Gremlins united to destroy cinema itself? They are punk-like, Godaridian agents of deconstruction. They use a 35mm filmstrip to murder film critic Leonard Maltin while he was reviewing the first "Gremlins." The film is a brilliant piece of work. Also, it has a spider gremlin. 

The best example of the film's deconstructionist tendencies comes from a sequence about halfway through the film wherein Dante stages a fake film break. The image shudders for a moment, then burns through. It appears as though the theater's projector has broken down in real time. But gremlins then appear on the screen in silhouette, as if they are in the projection booth, having ripped apart the film print. "Gremlins 2" destroyed "Gremlins 2." 

In a 2020 oral history printed by Consequence, Dante revealed that he wanted to take the projection booth sequence even further. He had a practical, William Castle-inspired idea to include physical gremlins in the theater. 

William Castle is one of Dante's favorite filmmakers, as evidenced by Dante's 1993 film "Matinee," a film about a Castle-like filmmaker. Castle was known for his in-theater gimmicks, often hiring actors to scream during his movies, or equipping theaters with pulley systems to animate live skeletons during screenings. Dante felt that the projection booth sequence in "Gremlins 2" would have been enhanced with the insertion of real-world gremlins in the projection booth windows of movie theaters. As he described his desired gimmick: 

"My original idea, which the studio didn't go for, was that I thought if the audience thinks the Gremlins are up in the projectors then they'll turn around and look in the projection booth. And then I thought if you had cardboard cutout Gremlins on springs that you could put up in the window, then they could turn and they would see Gremlins in their projection booth. I thought that was a great idea but the studio just didn't want to bother."

That sounds like a lot of fun, although actually rigging up cardboard cutouts would take a lot of logistics and arranging by movie theater staff members, and that's a whole new series of headaches. Also, it would be expensive to manufacture the right-sized gremlin cutouts for all theaters; not all projection booth windows are the same size. 

Eventually, Dante got his wish, however. In 2025, at a "Gremlins 2" screening at Vidiots in Los Angeles, California, the projectionists were given rubber gremlins to puppeteer during the projection booth sequence, and it played like gangbusters. The footage of the live event can be seen on the Vidiots Instagram account. In 1990, it was impractical. In 2025, it's genius.