A Cult '90s Sci-Fi Comedy About Evil Toys Should Get A Remake

Nostalgia is still big business in 2026, and while that usually means an unending series of cash grabs on the part of Hollywood studios, it can also make for some thrilling returns to celebrated franchises. 1998's "Small Soldiers" might not fit the definition of a beloved property, but Joe Dante's action comedy has all the '90s charm and characteristic Dante quirk you could want. It's also oddly relevant to our modern age and had the potential to be more than it ultimately was upon its debut. As such, while it's great that we're finally getting "Gremlins 3" (even if it is missing the most important part of the original films), "Small Soldiers" is just as, if not more, worthy of a revisit.

In 2025, both Edgar Wright's "The Running Man" remake and the thoughtless sequel "Tron: Ares" flopped spectacularly at the box office, suggesting that just because a certain IP was popular in the 1980s, that doesn't mean audiences of today are excited by or even familiar with it. What's more, given the typical 20-30 year nostalgia cycle, 1980s-mania is clearly waning as a fondness for the 1990s and early 2000s culture emerges. With that in mind, Dante's mostly forgotten late-'90s action comedy is perfectly placed for a remake.

Sure, "Small Soldiers" wasn't exactly a mega-hit in 1998, but that's part of the reason it deserves a remake in the 2020s. If you're going to continue desperately repackaging hits of yesteryear, why not give an unfairly dismissed movie another chance, too? "Small Soldiers" is that movie. What's more, its themes are strikingly relevant to our current moment, in which an AI garbage future looms (much to Joe Russo's delight).

"Small Soldiers" has a perfectly off-kilter premise for a Joe Dante movie. It revolves around two sets of toys that become sentient after being fitted with high-end advanced artificial intelligence chips. The two toy factions — the Gorgonites and the Commando Elite — then become enemies, with the latter making it their mission to destroy the peaceful Gorgonites. This all plays out in a small U.S. town after Alan Abernathy (Gregory Smith), a young toy store worker, activates the Gorgonite and Commando Elite leaders. Much like with "Gremlins," the American suburbs then become the setting for a bizarre series of anarchic events as the two factions wage war.

Aside from being a lot of zany '90s fun, "Small Soldiers" has a murderer's row of voice talent, with Frank Langella and Tommy Lee Jones voicing the two toy leaders. The film also features an unlikely battle between two casts of entirely separate movies. Many of the Gorgonites are voiced by "This Is Spinal Tap" actors, including Michael McKean, Christopher Guest, and Harry Shearer, while a lot of the Commando Elite are voiced by cast members from 1967's "The Dirty Dozen," including Ernest Borgnine and Jim Brown. There's even voice cameos from Sarah Michelle Gellar and Christina Ricci as two dolls.

"Small Soldiers" also comes imbued with a wholesome charm, which makes a lot of sense given that Amblin Entertainment was one of the production companies involved with the film. What makes "Small Soldiers" particularly interesting in that respect, however, is that it's also a bit edgier than your typical Amblin outing. That's likely down to the fact that Dante claimed he was initially tasked with making a more mature film for teens before later being asked to tone things down.

In some ways, "Small Soldiers" was doomed to fall through the cracks of cinema history due to its unorthodox mix of tones. One part charming Amblin family film and one part edgy teen action comedy, Joe Dante's movie just didn't really fit in. Still, it did make $71.7 million at the box office on a $40 million budget, which wasn't exactly a triumph but was far from a disaster. More importantly, it showed potential, and now would be the perfect time to realize that potential.

For better or worse, artificial intelligence is on the rise, and just as the culture of the late-90s/early-2000s was simultaneously fascinated and terrified by the emerging digital age and the technology it produced, so, too, are we parsing our own feelings about emerging tech via cinema. The "M3GAN" franchise is one example that also happens to echo the same fears that reside somewhere in the bizarre mix that is "Small Soldiers." Both films feature dolls of different types becoming sentient and wreaking havoc on otherwise peaceful American families, and both surely encapsulate deep-seated societal fears about tech eventually replacing us all.

As such, now is surely the time to give "Small Soldiers" another run at capturing mass audiences' attention. Not all explorations of our fears around AI need to come via horror films, and while remaking yet another movie from a prior decade isn't really what we need right now, "Small Soldiers" was such a delightfully weird little film that a remake wouldn't feel quite as shamefully cynical as, say, our nostalgia-obsessed monoculture churning out a "Harry Potter" reboot.